According to the statistics from the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism, the country now has about 1,000 travel agents registering to provide outbound travel services and more than 10,000 providing inbound tours with approximately 8,000 licensed tour guides. Each month, Vietnam welcomes nearly 40,000 international tourists, but the tour operators only provide about 27 percent of tour guides that meet the language requirements and standards of the native visitors. The foreign language skills and cultural knowledge of the tour guides has many limitations, which affect the quality of tourism services.
According to Luong Duc Hiep, a tour guide of Hanoitourist, a tour guide is the one who follows and guides the tourists throughout the journey so he needs to make a good impression to the tourists right from the first moment. And it is not only the impressive attitude and behaviours in the communication but also the amount of information provided to the tourists.
But the provisions of useful and accurate information to the tourists depend on the awareness and attitudes of the tour guides. According to Hoang Hai, a tour guide of the Thang Loi Tourism and Trade Investment Company, the information provided to the tourists should be prepared carefully because this is the way a tour guide could accumulate new knowledge.
Moreover, the information to the tourists needs to be supportive and characterised by the destination rather than general information. “For the foreign tourists, a tour guide should introduce an overview of the history, culture and characteristics of Vietnam. And depending on each tourism attraction, the tour guide needs to know what customers need and expect to provide to full and specific information as required,” said Nguyen Viet Long, a tour guide of Viettour company, who won the first prize of the best tour guide contest in Hanoi in 2007.
However, according to Le Trung Thu, a tour guide of the Vietnam Labour Union Travel Company, not all of tour guides could do this well. Many companies have misconception that a tour guide only needs to know foreign languages and have presentations skills, without taking any training. Some of tour guides are required to take some short courses in only a few months and this can not be enough to help them introduce about their country, people, and culture.
According to Thu, the main reason the tour guide provide wrong information about monuments and tourist destinations due to their focusing too much on profits but the responsibility. Many tour guides try to earn money from the tourists by shaking hands with some of sales stores rather than accumulating new knowledge, which leads the misunderstanding of the tourists towards the Vietnam and Vietnamese people.
According to Thu, the tourism training institutions and tourism licensing agencies should be strictly supervised. Each party needs to be responsible for their activities and jobs, which helps train a professional group of tour guides and provide a high quality source of tour guides to Vietnam tourism industry in the near future.
Based on the requirements of the development of the tourism industry, the tour guides should improve both of the quality and quantity of the tour guides. Therefore, each tour guide first needs to improve their knowledge and job ethics to better respond to their works.
Thu Huyen
Đăng ký: VietNam News