Tour guide communication competence: French, German and American tourists' perceptions

The primary goal of this paper is to examine cross-national variations in the perceived importance of communication competencies of tour guides. Tour guides play an important role as cultural buffers and also serve as communication links between tourists and host populations, and yet their communication competence is perhaps the least emphasized aspect in tourism research. Communication research provides a theoretical framework to investigate this topic and this research represents a first bridge between these two disciplines.