The desirable characteristics of Thai tourist guide to enter ASEAN Community in perspective of tourism business operators in Bangkok

Abstract

The purposes of this research were 1) to study the desirable characteristics of Thai tourist guide to enter the ASEAN Community in perspective of tourism business operators in Bangkok, and 2) to compare the desirable characteristics of a Thai tourist guide as expected by tourism business operators classified by the personal factors. A questionnaire was used to collect data from 281 sampled tourism business operators in Bangkok by using purposive sampling. The collected data was analyzed through frequency, percentage, arithmetic mean, standard deviation, t-test, F-test (One Way ANOVA), and Least Significant Difference (LSD). The results indicated that 1) the desirable characteristics of Thai tourist guides in 4 perspectives of tourism business operators in Bangkok were at a high level. When considered in each aspect, the result showed that every aspect was at the high level either, arranged in descending order as following: attitude, skill, personality, and professional knowledge. 2) There was no significant difference in the type of enterprise, and income of enterprise concerning desirable characteristics of Thai tourist guides as expected by tourism business operators in Bangkok, but were a significant difference in the size of enterprise and period of enterprise at the statistical significance level of 0.05.