Changing roles of tour guides: From “agent to serve” to “agent of change”

Abstract

The guided tour industry has undergone drastic changes in China along with the socio-economic, demographic, and technological developments of the past decades, leading to new demands on the tour guide profession. The COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated the changes. Yet little is known regarding how the tour guides’ roles have evolved. This study aims to fill this gap through exploring new roles and services undertaken by tour guides, drawing on qualitative data (in-depth interviews) from both tour guides’ and tourists’ recent guided tour experience in China. The findings demonstrate a continuum of roles of the guides, ranging from “the serving roles” to being “the ones who facilitate changes.” Five main driving forces were identified, namely: the tourists’ customization needs, demographic change, rapid ICT development, increased special interests, and the pandemic and tourists’ favor in remote destinations. Instead of expecting serving roles only, the Chinese tourists now welcome roles that can foster positive changes, reflecting Chinese tourists’ motivational shift to having eudaimonic experience through traveling.

Performativities, pandemic pressures and ‘patchwork’ tourism places: Editor-in-Chief notes

“…The notion of pandemic pressures, individual and place transformations and their related social practices runs through Di Matteo and Daminelli (2024) work on volunteer tourism in the Mediterranean island of Lesvos and Ren et al’s (2024) study of tour guides in China. In Di Matteo and Daminelli (2024) autoethnography, the island received a constant flow of volunteer tourists who began working on the island in 2015.…”

“…Di Matteo & Daminelli draw on their autoethnographies in the camp and on the island to share their experiences and observations of the crises, painting a more nuanced and critical story of volunteer tourism – one that steers away from essentialising refugees as necessarily ‘vulnerable’. Over in pandemic-hit China, Ren et al (2024) examined how the role of tour guides has undergone a transformation from one focused on serving to one that encompasses the facilitation of positive changes at tourism places. The pandemic is found to have provided the environment for tour guides in China to engage with technology and social media platforms to customise their tours.…”

“…While taking place in diverse geographical regions and political-social situations from lockdown China to pre-viral Scotland, these four articles converge on at least two significant research trajectories. Two of these articles (Schiavone and Brandellero, 2024; Tham et al, 2024) are united in their examinations of film and social mediated tourism place practices while the remaining two (Di Matteo and Daminelli, 2024; Ren et al, 2024) converge on critical interrogations of worker-volunteer agencies and struggles. The notion of a ‘patchwork’ had also been employed, in two divergent localities in most of our tourism imaginations – Schiavone and Brandellero (2024) taking on the multi-mediated and multi-layered aspects of experiences to discuss Edinburgh’s app-based film tourism while Di Matteo and Daminelli (2024) conceptualised their fieldwork at Lesvos’ refugee camp as a ‘comparative patchwork autoethnography’.…”