Edinburgh Napier University

  Purpose
Tourists’ resource integration both offers opportunities and presents challenges to tourism service providers. Focussing on the tour guide perspective, this paper explores how tour guides experience knowledge/information-based asymmetry in encounters with tourists, and identifies the roles and coping strategies used by guides to facilitate service co-production.

Methodology
Critical incident technique (CIT) is used in qualitative interviews with 47 tour guides in Scotland, broadly representative of the Scottish tour guiding context. 107 critical incidents were analysed, with an average of 2.32 incidents per interview. Narrative analysis of the incidents was performed inductively in four iterative steps using QSR NVivo.

Findings
Three resource asymmetry incident categories are identified: 1) Probing - Guide-Oracle is questioned by inquiring tourists and copes through diverting, evasion, and follow-up strategies; 2) Learning - Guide-Magpie learns from expert tourists through acknowledging and co-delivery; and 3) Negotiation - Guide-Diplomat with greater knowledge helps misguided tourists save face through appeasing, following the official line, and tactfully correcting.

Originality
The paper contributes to service co-production research in tourism by theorising about contexts where knowledge/information asymmetry exists between tour guides and tourists, particularly where fluid power relations between guides and knowledgeable tourists occur, or where misguided tourists co-produce the service by prioritising own meanings. Findings highlight the importance of soft skills and other non-content capabilities of guides, and suggestions are offered for effective training and resource sharing/ learning initiatives for tour guiding services.