Tour guides’ performance and tourists’ immersion: facilitating consumer immersion by performing a guide plus role

Tour guides are key front-line players in the tourism industry. This article focuses on how tour guide performance influences tourists’ involvement, thereby facilitating consumer immersion. First, we explore the tour guide’s basic role of establishing a thematised and secure experiencescape, which is a pre-requisite for immersion. Basic guide performance fulfils service-quality standards. We argue that tour guides can facilitate consumer immersion in the experiencescape by performing a “guide plus” role. In this role, a guide cares for and focuses on each individual’s involvement and meaning-creation processes and exceeds that defined in traditional service-quality and satisfaction research. Pivotal to the “guide plus” role are a guide’s abilities as a storyteller, social mediator and instructor. The article concludes that a “guide plus” performance has the ability to facilitate consumer immersion. Hence, an effective tour guide can enhance tourist involvement and engender immersion, thereby transforming a regular experience into an extraordinary experience.