Abstract
The current global pandemic, stemming from the existence of the COVID-19 virus has devastated the global and national economies, plunging the tourism value chain and stakeholders, including the tourist guides, into crisis. In mitigating the risk on tourism SMMEs and tourist guides, government introduced and disbursed several financial relief packages, including the COVID-19 Tourism Relief Fund (TRF) as a measure toward ensuring the survival of tourist guides through this crisis as well as building their resilience, to better equip these tourism stakeholders to deal with crisis in the future. Thus, this research was undertaken to analyse tour guides recovery and survival relating to the COVID-19 crisis. A mixed method research design was adopted, using indepth interviews held with tourism key informants and surveys administered to tourist guides in Gauteng. A total of five key informant interviews and two hundred surveys were collected at the end of the data collection period. The findings of this study shows that in Gauteng, most tourist guides were severely negatively impacted by this pandemic, with many guides being forced into business closure, the selling of assets, utilising personal savings or leaving the industry in search of alternate and available employment. Given the month-to-month earnings of many tourist guides, their risk management behaviours prior to this crisis were minimal. This precarious financial situation became even more pronounced with the onset of this crisis. Additionally, the lack of access to financial contingencies and non-financial support programmes offered by government further compromised their resilience capabilities and threatened their survival. This study points to policy and systemic recommendations, which, if accepted and implemented, could assist the reignition of the tourist guide profession post-pandemic and ensure they form part of the tourism sector recovery trajectory. Additionally, further research on tourist guides in South Africa needs to be conducted, to fully understand the various aspect of this profession in the country. This study is important given the important role that tourist guides occupy in the sector. The impact of this crisis on tourist guides located in other provinces of the country and research on the long term impact of the government support measure would also be a useful investigation, to determine the utility of such measure.