AN EXPLORATION OF TOURIST GUIDES' COMPETENCIES TO CREATE MEMORABLE TOURIST EXPERIENCES

Tourist guiding in South Africa is a sector of the tourism industry that is subject to regulation to acquire competence and skills to meet the guiding standards and to provide quality services to tourists. The research aims to explore the skill sets perceived by tourist guides as the most important in their professional practice to create a memorable tourist experience to ensure that skills perceived to be most important are considered during the guiding training course for present and future tourist guides to prepare them for both employment, long-life learning and enhance their performance to attain the highest level of customer satisfaction. This study made use of a descriptive quantitative research approach through an online survey research design to collect data. A non-random sample of 320 tourist guides was selected to participate in the study. Data from the online survey was coded into numerical representations and captured in Microsoft Excel. Descriptive statistics together with a confirmatory factor analysis were used to analyse and interpret the results. The results showed various skill sets perceived as the most important from the tourist guides' perspective, including honesty and reliability, ethical skills, time management, customer care skills, health and safety skills and communication skills.