Tour Guiding in Turkey: Outlooks from “Urban and Sustainable” Aspects

Abstract

Also known as urban tourism, city tourism has been a central argument of some tourism studies especially over the last decade and its acceptance is on the increase more and more. Nonetheless, it is not an intangible theme in that the concept itself hints details regarding the connection between tourism. Per se, thanks to its intertwined association to tourism, some cities came to be called through a use of adjective like “love, smart, slow, gastronomy, etc... (cities)”. In other words, each city in question assumed a strategy in rendering the city-related qualities into tourism business. Additionally, it is not surprising that the problem of how sustainable is urban tourism made its way into the tourism literature. Owing to the cutting-edge transport tool and other developments, attraction to urban sides has been going up more than ever in the last decade considering tourism attractiveness and day-based excursions have taken their righteous place especially as weekend activities. Tour guiding in Turkey is a topic of everlasting discussion amongst the academics of Tourism Faculties or tourism-related fields in Turkey pertaining to the means through which an obligatory tourist guiding license can be obtained. Under the lights of the above-mentioned points, this paper sets out to present an assessment of the extant position of urban tourism and related studies in terms of sustainability in tourist guiding and run a conceptual analysis on the repercussion of sustainability and practices-related to sustainability under tour guiding business, then offering some practical implications for future studies.