Visitor perceptions of the roles of tour guides in Kakum National Park in Ghana

National parks are global cornerstones supporting not only biodiversity conservation but also educational and recreational opportunities. Based on these opportunities, ecotourism has gained wide application in national parks as a sustainable form of tourism, providing visitors with recreational and educational opportunities to garner support for biodiversity conservation. Tour guides play vital roles to support these opportunities whiles ensuring appropriate behaviours and attitudes of visitors in the park. The performance of these roles potentially influences visitors' satisfaction, which has the potential to ensure repeat visits, referrals, and financial success of national parks and other protected areas. However, the literature indicates limited studies examining visitor satisfaction with tour guiding. Therefore, this paper investigated visitors' perceptions of the importance and performance of the roles of tour guides in order to identify areas needing management interventions to improve visitor satisfaction. Using convenient sampling, questionnaires were administered to 200 visitors to rate the importance and performance of a set of role attributes of tour guiding. The data were subjected to descriptive, gap and grid analyses. The results showed that there were role attributes that were important to the experiences sought by visitors. Also, some attributes were identified that required management intervention and re-allocation of resources to improve visitor satisfaction.