Communication Competences of Professional Tour Guides

Effective communication is one of the many skills professional tour guides needs to possess to effectively perform their job. These communication competences can lead to varied levels of standard of living among the tour guides. The purpose of this paper is to understand the extent to which communication competences and personality types influence tour guides’ performance as measured by a variety of quality of life indicators including the number of tours assigned to them, income, networking, and friendships. Communication Competence and International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) were used to explain the relationship. Data were collected from 326 tour guides who completed the questionnaire during a yearly workshop/seminars series organized by the Chamber of Antalya Tour Guides in Antalya, Turkey and the Ministry of Tourism. Factor analysis delineate underline domains of communication competences, regression is used to determine their effects on tour guides’ self-declared performance. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed within the theory of Behavioral Communication Competence and Big Five Personality Traits

Social media use and impact during the holiday travel planning process

Through an empirical study among holiday travellers, residing in the Former Soviet Union Republics, this paper presents a comprehensive view of role and impact of social media on the whole holiday travel planning process: Before, during and after the trip, providing insights on usage levels, scope of use, level of influence and trust. Findings suggest that social media are predominantly used after holidays for experience sharing. It is also shown that there is a strong correlation between perceived level of influence from social media and changes made in holiday plans prior to final decisions. Moreover, it is revealed that user-generated content is perceived as more trustworthy when compared to official tourism websites, travel agents and mass media advertising

Linking ecosystem services, urban form and green space configuration using multivariate landscape metric analysis

Context: Landscape metrics represent powerful tools for quantifying landscape structure, but uncertainties persist around their interpretation. Urban settings add unique considerations, containing habitat structures driven by the surrounding built-up environment. Understanding urban ecosystems, however, should focus on the habitats rather than the matrix. Objectives: We coupled a multivariate approach with landscape metric analysis to overcome existing shortcomings in interpretation. We then explored relationships between landscape characteristics and modelled ecosystem service provision. Methods: We used principal component analysis and cluster analysis to isolate the most effective measures of landscape variability and then grouped habitat patches according to their attributes, independent of the surrounding urban form. We compared results to the modelled provision of three ecosystem services. Seven classes resulting from cluster analysis were separated primarily on patch area, and secondarily by measures of shape complexity and inter-patch distance. Results: When compared to modelled ecosystem services, larger patches up to 10 ha in size consistently stored more carbon per area and supported more pollinators, while exhibiting a greater risk of soil erosion. Smaller, isolated patches showed the opposite, and patches larger than 10 ha exhibited no additional areal benefit. Conclusions: Multivariate landscape metric analysis offers greater confidence and consistency than analysing landscape metrics individually. Independent classification avoids the influence of the urban matrix surrounding habitats of interest, and allows patches to be grouped according to their own attributes. Such a grouping is useful as it may correlate more strongly with the characteristics of landscape structure that directly affect ecosystem function

State of the world’s plants and fungi 2020

Kew’s State of the World’s Plants and Fungi project provides assessments of our current knowledge of the diversity of plants and fungi on Earth, the global threats that they face, and the policies to safeguard them. Produced in conjunction with an international scientific symposium, Kew’s State of the World’s Plants and Fungi sets an important international standard from which we can annually track trends in the global status of plant and fungal diversity

Gender images in state tourism brochures: An overlooked area in socially responsible tourism marketing

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to examine photographs (pictorial displays) presented in state tourism promotional materials for gender depictions within Goffman"s framework. Specifically, the study investigated latent (i.e., facial expressions, gestures) and manifested (i.e., roles, activities) characteristics delineating relationships between men and women and the roles and meanings associated with these depictions. The results suggest that women are depicted in "traditional stereotypical" poses (i.e., subordinate, submissive, dependent) disproportionately more often than men. These findings suggest that tourism advertisers and destination promoters need to be aware of both the subtle and more blatant visual cues that depict the relationship between men and women in tourism advertisements. Article: Aware of the economic contribution of tourism to local economies, destinations around the globe spend billions of dollars on tourism advertising to capture larger shares of the tourism market in an effort to fulfill their tourism potential. In the United States alone, according to a recent report, state tourism offices allocated $478.7 million for promotion in 1997-98; total advertising for U.S. travel and tourism in 1996 was nearly$1.03 billion (U.S. Travel Data Center 1998). Because public monies are spent in search of new tourist dollars, legislators and taxpayers are increasingly holding state tourism divisions accountable Women"s role and status in both the family and society have evolved dramatically in the United States since the 1940s. Women have entered the labor force in substantial numbers and assumed a variety of professional and managerial positions that were once monopolized by me

Efficacy of static shift-share analysis in measuring tourism industry's performance in South Carolina

[No abstract available