Do Tourists Cooperate with the Tour Guide? The Moderating Role of Tour Guide Gender; A Sequential Mixed-Methods Study

The purpose of this study is to identify the characteristics of tour guides that affect tourist experiences and tourist cooperative behavior. Using an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design based on Social Exchange Theory, the study began with a thematic analysis of 123 TripAdvisor online reviews using MAXQDA. In qualitative phase we found that tourists often appreciate a tour guide by their humor and storytelling as an engagement technique facilitating learning and result in satisfaction. These findings directly were used for the quantitative phase assessing the research model through 305 tourists and analyzed by PLS-SEM. The quantitative results showed humor and storytelling have considerable effects on tourist cooperative behavior, which is totally mediated by positive emotion and trust’s impact is completely dependent on positive emotion. The moderating role of tour guide gender revealed female guides’ humor are more effective for creating positive emotions and male guides’ storytelling are more impactful. This study by using real online reviews in qualitative phase to find key variables for quantitative phase, provides a valuable methodological contribution. Our findings provide evidence-based insights for travel agencies to promote these characteristics of tour guide with theoretical and practical implications.