Abstract:
Sri Lankan Tourism is the fast-booming industry for around 8 years. As Sri Lanka is having vast amount of wonderful and exotic destinations all around the island. Some of them are destinations which have a cultural and heritage value. Tourism in a destination highly depend on the quality of tour guides in the destination. This is spatially true in heritage and cultural tourism. As the persons who mostly interact with tourists, tour guides are directly responsible for customer perspective of the destination. So, the issues affecting the tour guides very directly and indirectly effects on their service quality and professionalism. The purpose of this research study was to study on the critical issues affecting the service quality and professionalism of the tour guides. Research area is Sigiriya and Dambulla heritage sites, Sigiriya is the most visited destination in cultural triangle Sri Lanka, and both Sigiriya and Dambulla heritage sites nominated as world heritage sites by UNESCO. This research contains literature about Tour guides; type of tour guides; Sigiriya and Dambulla cultural sites; Service quality and professionalism of the tour guides. These parts are relevant to this research because it is important to understand the topic and previous research done in this field. In this research work, the researcher adopts the semi-structured interview style to gathered data about issues affecting the service quality and professionalism of the tour guides. The major four types of tour guides were interviewed and their issues and problems are used as the basis of the researcher's analysis from which findings are extracted and recommendations made. Qualitative data have analysed through thematic analysis using Microsoft excel 2016 software. By using thematic analysis method researcher identified the themes in the data set. The findings of this study gave rise to identify issues affecting service quality and professionalism of tour guides, those issues will be directly affecting to tour guides service quality and professionalism if not properly identified and overcome. The whole destination image about Sri Lanka will be damage among other countries around the world. A general conclusion is that the issues facing by tour guides will directly affect to their service quality and professionalism.
Keywords: tour guides, service quality, professionalism, issues, Sigiriya and
Dambulla heritage sites
