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Turkey is among the world's tourist destinations with its modern facilities and high quality service in addition to its natural beauties, historical past and cultural heritage. Istanbul has an important position among these destinations with its tourism resources and the tourist density it hosts. Tourist guides play an important role in the promotion of Istanbul. Because tourist guides are important actors in tourism industry, which accompanies tourists during their travels, helps tourists to get know the region they visit and makes a significant contribution to the interaction between tourists and local people. It is aimed with this study to determine foreign tourists' perceptions about Turkey, Istanbul, tourism and tourist guide through metaphors. For this purpose, a literature review was conducted and a semi-structures interview form was prepared. Information was collected through the prepared interview form by face-to-face interviews with Russian, German and Iranian tourists visiting Istanbul with a tour guide. The tourists, participated in this research, developed various metaphors for the forenamed concepts. These metaphors were divided into categories by examining their common features and previous studies. Also it has been tried to determine whether there are differences between metaphors and categories developed by tourists according to their nationalities. As a result of this study iı has been identified that Russian and German tourists developed metaphors related to society about Turkey. Iranian tourists often develop metaphors related to environment about Turkey. For the concept of Istanbul, German tourists developed metaphors related to emotions, Russian and Iranian tourists developed metaphors related to history and culture. For the concept of tourism, German and Russian tourists mostly develop metaphors related to classical perceptions, while Iranian tourists frequently develop metaphors about economy. All three groups of tourists developed metaphors about qualifications for the concept of tourist guide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on tourist guiding in the books of National Tourism Congresses between 1990 and 2015 have been evaluated within the scope of several parameters. In this context, the purposes of this study are to reveal general features of tourist guiding literature and make it easier for the researchers of this area to be studied. Frequency and percentage analysis of collected data were conducted after they were loaded to statistical analysis package software. As a result of the analysis, it was obvious that the highest number of papers were published in the 15th National Tourism Congress. With regards to the number of writers, works with two authors were the majority. The most frequently used key words in the papers were "tourism" and "tourism guiding". The first and second writers were found to be working at the University of Balıkesir and the most studied subject was education in the papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Statement of the Problem: Tourist guide is the person that someone encounters first in the country that he or she had gone for holiday and he accompanies them during their holidays. For this reason, it is important that apart from the sufficient knowledge and qualification the tourist guide has, he or she should has the necessary communication equipment for information transfer. But when the training process of the tourist guide is examined, it is observed that not too much importance was given to the communication area in the context of tourist guide training both in common and formal training. This situation may affect the performance of the tourist guides negatively. Purpose of the study: Determination of the views of the tourists that came to Turkey on the importance given by the tourists to the communication competencies of tourist guides and to communication performance of the tourist guides and examination of the factors that affects these views by CHAID analysis. Method: The data were collected by the questionnaire that is prepared for having data about the views that the tourists that came to Antalya has about importance given by the tourists to the communication competencies of tourist guides and to communication performance of the tourist guides. The data that acquired were analyzed with SPSS programme. Findings: At the end of the research it is determined that the most important factor for the importance given by the tourists to the communication competencies of tourist guides and to communication performance of the tourist guides is country variable. Results: Importance that the English Tourist guides gave to the communication competence is much more than Germans and Russians. Similarly the view of English tourists on communication performance is much more positive than the Russians and the Germans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]