SERVICE QUALITY OF TOURIST GUIDES AND THEIR ROLE IN TRAVEL AGENCY MARKETING

Tourist guides are in direct contact with the tourists on the group package tours. They play an important role in creating tourist experience and the perception of a destination and travel company. For that reason, the purpose of this study was to determine customers’ perceptions of service provided by tourist guides in group package tours which were organized by Serbian travel agencies. Research model used 16 items of service quality which were grouped into four dimensions. The paper provided results and indicated the items of tourist guide service quality that should be improved. Further, it was explored how the four service factors were related to reputation of travel agency and word-of-mouth marketing. The results of regression analysis showed that dimensions of service quality of tourist guides influence the reputation of a travel agency and word-of-mouth marketing, whereby the importance of tourist guides in group package tours was again confirmed.
tourismos, Vol. 9 No. 1 (2014)