An Exploratory Study About Child-Friendly Trips

Abstract

The main idea of child-friendly tourism is to consider children's physical and psychological health in all kinds of travel and holiday experiences. Also, it aims to arrange activities in line with children's development skills. Child-friendly trips are an essential part of these skills, as they support personal, sociocultural, and physical contexts for children. Tour guides are one of the most critical companions that support these contexts. This paper tries to uncover how child-friendly trips are done from the perspective of tour guides. It aims to reveal child-friendly trip interpretation, child-friendly tour guides' features, and difficulties. A qualitative research method was used, and tour guides who made domestic and daily child-friendly trips in TURKEY attended the study. Twenty-two semi-structured interviews based on content analysis were examined. The findings revealed that although child-friendly trips have the same characteristics as other group tours, they have different interpretation styles. Tour guides should have specific attributions to successfully affect the children and slog on the trip. Child-friendly tourism literature is a developing field of study with some theoretical gaps. This study contributes to the literature by offering a broader perspective of child-friendly trip context regarding tourist guides.