Scenarios for the future of tour guiding: A Delphi-based analysis for 2040

Many events in the historical process impacted tour guiding, a professional group within the fragile tourism industry, and it is still being affected. To resist negative impacts, such fields need long-term strategies and a comprehensive understanding. Developing future scenarios is an important basis for long-term strategy development. Nevertheless, research exposes that there is a lack of awareness among tour guiding researchers and practitioners about future scenarios. This study addresses this gap by applying an extensive Delphi-based scenario study to create scenarios of the development of the tour guiding profession for the year 2040. We conducted the study using a four-step research approach, focusing on its political, economic, sociocultural, technological, and operational aspects. Scenario development builds on a literature review, two rounds of semi-structured interviews, a focus group interview, and a two-round real-time Delphi survey. In total, 34 projections and 241 comments were gathered using the Delphi method from tour guides and academicians. The outcomes are based on fuzzy clustering, which is used to classify the data into scenarios that are meaningful and interpretable. The study presented three scenarios about the future of tour guiding: (a) possible and most desirable, (b) plausible and desirable, and (c) surprising and less desirable.