Tourist Guides: Excessive Demand

Although being a hard job, tourist guide profession is acknowledged to be an attractive job with chance to travel and high income. According to Fiditourist Travel Agent, salary for tourism guides of English is now US$20/day, Chinese US$25/day, French and Japanese US$30/day. Meanwhile, tourist guides of some uncommon languages such as Spanish, Italian and South Korean will be well paid.

 

The sharp increase in the number of important visitors such as Japanese, South Korean, and Russian has made tourist guide job attractive, resulting in the increasing lack of tourist guides. According to statistics of the Ministry of Culture-Tourism-Sport, as many as 5,169 international tourist guides have been granted practice licenses nationwide. In which, there are 295 tourist guides for key travellers such as Japanese, (the number of visitors were 269,797 arrivals in the first eight months of this year, up 14.8 per cent on year), 26 guides for South Korean, (335,424 arrivals, up 22.3 per cent), 20 guides for Thailand’s tourists (107,265 arrivals, a growth of 34.7 per cent on year). Less than 10 tourist guides have been licensed for rare languages such as Bulgarian (with two guides) and Italian (with eight guides). The shortage of tourist guides (especially in peak time between October of this year and April of next year) has brought about many problems for management task as well as development planning for Vietnam’s tourism sector.

 

In order to solve this issue, many enterprises have filled up the gap by using unprofessional tourist guides from colleges of foreign language or those who have been working for international organisations. This has resulted in the decrease in quality and guiding process due to unqualified heterodox tourist guides who have not updated enough information related to tourism activities. In order to successfully guide a tourist delegation, apart from good capacity in foreign language, specialist knowledge, beauty spots along tour routes, tourist guides have to have a good demand of geography, culture, society, history, customs and living styles of each localities and basic information about visitors’ countries. On the other hands, in front of international travellers, tourist guides will be a diplomat. As a result, a tourist guide has to take responsibility to the country. They have to be active, firm, sensitive and flexible in unexpected situations in guiding process.

 

The rent of unprofessional tourist guide is able to fill up the shortage in the short term. However, travel agents are always facing an implicit risk of penalisation because almost heterodox tourist guides do not have practice cards. In order to avoid penalisation, many travel companies have rented tourist guides with practice cards to go with delegation, while the main guides are foreigners. This action will not only increase cost for businesses, but also affecting tourists’ experience during the trip as foreign tourist guides have not good knowledge of Vietnam’s culture as local tourist guides. It will be more serious when foreign tourist guides distort Vietnam’s country image and people, especially harmful information to the sovereignty, security, national defence, social security and order of the local country.

 

According to the preliminary statistic, the country now has 38 tourist training units, thousands of graduates from tourism colleges each year, in which many graduates have become tourist guides. However, most of these graduates are unable to become a professional tourist guides immediately because of their lack of practical experience and ineffective foreign language ability to ensure successful guidance.

 

A senior official from a travel agent said that facing the tourist guide shortage, his company has to always seek new graduates from tourism colleges each year to find good tourist guides, but few of them can do. Graduates from colleges of foreign language have good demand of language, but lack specialist knowledge in tourism sector. As a result, travel companies have to start training graduates right after the recruitment in order to ensure sufficient tourist guides for peak tourism seasons. In general, teachers of foreign language for tourism guides have not enough specialist knowledge in tourism; contrariwise, teachers of tourism colleges have not good demand of foreign language. Moreover, when granting practice cards for new tourism guides, travel companies do not pay attention to retraining to improve their qualification and professional skills. This is a paradox in training process that Vietnam’s tourism sector has to take proper measures.