Year-end is the time when travel firms intensify rating and training tour guides to improve quality of their staff.
Year-end is the time when travel firms intensify rating and training tour guides to improve quality of their staff.
Long Phu Tourist Company and Khanh Hoa University have recently launched Long Phu Tourist Guide Club whose members are senior students in tour guiding. The club enables its members to join practical activities to practice guiding skills and become freelance guides for Long Phu Travel.
Every week, members take part in classes to learn about guiding profession, narrating experience, check-in & check-out at airports and hotels, etc. Members also are rated their capacity to arrange into tours and places later.
Tran Minh Duc, Deputy director of Long Phu Tourist Company, said, “The club aims to connect the business and university. The company’s guides will support students and give them experience before they graduate. It also partly reduces lack in good tour guides in peak season of tourism in Nha Trang – Khanh Hoa.”
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| Saigontourist tour guide collecting tourists from cruise ship |
| In Khanh Hoa Province, there are about 650 tourist guides, 343 of whom have been granted international tour guide licence. Most of the tour guides can speak English or French; few of them know Russian and Chinese. To improve their quality, the provincial Department of Tourism frequently opens training classes for tour guides. Colleges in the province have recently taught Russian and Chinese for their students of tour guiding. |
Nha Trang branch of Saigontourist now has 18 official tourist guides and 60 freelance ones. All of them are trained every year. Each year, two tourist guides of the branch with best progress will be sent to training class of the head company. “The chosen guides will have a chance to learn more knowledge as well as experience, then raise their level”, said Phan Dinh Thao, Deputy director of Saigontourist’s Nha Trang Branch. To freelance tour guides, tests are done through collecting comments from tourists.
Each company has different ways, but all of them try to improve quality of their tourist guides. It also has partly improved tourism of the province as well as the country.
Nhan Tam
Translated by T.T
