Design and implementation of tour guide portal for enhancing tourism in Tanzania

Abstract

Tour guides contribute significantly to the enjoyment and satisfaction of tourist thereby promoting tourism worldwide. Unfortunately, in many developing countries, it has been problematic to locate a suitable tour guide for particular tourism or wildlife activities. Although in Tanzania, there are various efforts to ensuring tour guides are professional; however, there is no baseline information about tour guides that can help plan and promote tourism through a tour guide. Moreover, the registration process for tour guides are unnecessarily cyclical, costly and time-consuming. This study, therefore, seeks to design and implement a Tour Guide Portal that will facilitate access to tour guide information for the promotion of the tourism sector in Tanzania. The study employed qualitative and quantitative methods and has found that User Generated Contents through learning library, discussion forums and reviewing and rating tour guides, can enhance the tour guide profession. In this work, we used agile methodology through extreme programming to develop a tour guide portal. Further, we used real participants to execute task scenarios in combination with think-aloud protocol and system usability scale to evaluate the usability of tour guide portal. This evaluation has found that the tour guide portal is usable and suitable for tour guide management in Tanzania. Additionally, this study employed a lean canvas to create a business model that will determine the operationalisation of tour guide portal in Tanzania. The findings of this study imply that tour guide portal is a massive step towards promoting the tour guide profession in Tanzania. It will avail the tour guide statistics to the government, assist tourism stakeholders locating the right tour guide for a particular activity and consequently enhance tourism in Tanzania.