Measuring the importance of communication skills in tourism

Abstract

Tourism service providers need to have expressive communication skills to be able to offer a better tourism product and create a pleasant tourist experience. To better understand, conceptualize, and achieve the multidimensional concept of communication skills, this paper aims to investigate the literature and propose a measurement scale adapted to the modern tourism workplace. Results, based on a literature review and questionnaire survey, show that five communication skill dimensions emerge: written, oral, listening, digital, and non-verbal communication skills. The paper's theoretical contribution is the systematization of the literature and the conceptualization of communication skills up to date, while its empirical contribution is based on the examination of collected data related to the validated scale measurement. The scale presented in this paper will assist future empirical research on communication skills required in the field of tourism. The paper will help generate novel research questions for identifying and analyzing acquired communication skills.