Challenges and Opportunities in Front of the Tour Guides During a Pandemic

Authors:

Pages: 274-279

Abstract:

The season of 2020 turned out to be a great challenge for the tourism industry around the world, including in Bulgaria. The pandemic has become the biggest enemy for hoteliers, restaurateurs, tour operators, but not least for tour guides, who are perhaps among the most severely affected. Both freelanced and employed tour guides, remain without the opportunity to practice their profession with months. Due to this reason some of them decided to make a change in their professional job and be retrain, which cause the industry loss of qualified staff. The other part are seeing an opportunity to keep in touch with tourists using various platforms, applications and creating virtual tours for them. In both cases, this is a change that requires adaptation. The aim of this report is to present the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic among the tour guides and to present how they are dealing with the situation.

Keywords:

tour guides; virtual tours; virtual tourism; pandemic.

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