Touring as labour: mobilities and reconsideration of tour guiding in everyday life

Abstract

The research adopts the mobilities approach to examining the everyday experience of tour guides. Scholars tend to highlight guides as service providers and cultural brokers, whose activities and feelings seem to be subordinate to tourism consumption. In contrast, the research moves beyond the context of business and economy and seeks to resituate tour guiding in ordinary life. It draws on the ethnographic fieldwork in Sanya, a coastal city in south China, and adopts the methods of secondary data collection, interviews and participant observation for data generation. Specifically, the research scrutinises how tourism mobilities are embedded into the production of local guides’ daily practices, emotions and feelings. Tour guiding is characterised by movement/stillness, instability and contested meanings. On working days, guides travel with tourists between scenic sites, receiving unstable income. The mobile work greatly shapes their everyday rhythms, social networks, familial lives and identities. On jobless days, guides are likely to confine ordinary practices to residence and suffer from deep anxiety. Immobilities arouse their feelings of inability and worries about the future, thus lowering their expectations of career and personal development. The research problematises the idiosyncrasy of tour guiding and underscores its close relationship with the production of everyday practices and experience, thus giving a wider view on tourism work. In so doing, it also enriches our understanding of the complexity of tourism mobilities and contributes to the debate on the de-differentiation of tourism.