Communication strategy for English guides: tourism area in Lombok island

Abstract

The popularity of Lombok in the tourism sector has been experienced by many foreign tourists. According to The West Nusa Tenggara Bureau of Statistic 2017, there are 1.404.328 people who have come to Lombok as foreign tourists, 10,3% of them used the Lombok Guide to arrange their trip. Based on the data, this research will discuss how communication strategies between Lombok tourist guides and English speaking tourists will be conducted. This research will focus on the common communication strategies that are being used by the guides. The source of this research will be the guides who work regularly at one of the travel agencies in Mataram city. The data will be collected from the recording of Lombok Guides and the English speaking tourists' conversations. This research reveals nine types of communication strategies such as message abandonment, topic avoidance, circumlocution, approximation, use all-purpose words, prefabricated, non-linguistic, stalling/time gaining, and over-elaboration. Finally, of the 63 total acts, the most common communication strategies or the dominant ones are message abandonment with a total of 15 acts about 23,8%, less dominant is an approximation with a total of 5 acts about 7,9% and the least dominant are over-elaboration with a total of 2 acts about 3,2%. In summary, the guides need to improve their skills and performance to tackle the problems that are present in the research.