TGUIDE

TGUIDE Professional Reconnaissance in Heritage & Travel

Professional Reconnaissance in Heritage & Travel is carried out by tour guides, tour planners, or tour group leaders as they prepare for the arrival of a new group of visitors. Our template for this is the TGUIDE TEN TIPS 12-panel, folded-sheet. Travel writers, too, approach new destinations with the same set of headings to work with. The ten headings provide you with a framework that you can turn into questions when you are out in the field investigating a new town. By using the questions that a real tourist would ask, but modified slightly to elicit additional value, you will enrich the knowledge you discover. For example, rather than simply asking "Where is the castle?", or in French « Où se trouve le château ? » try to elicit more knowledge from your local respondent by including a value-laden adjective: "Which is the best route to the castle?" or "What is the best way of getting to the castle?" « Le château, qu'est-ce que le meilleur chemin pour y accéder, s'il vous plaît ? » Or ask for "the prettiest walking route", « Le plus beau itinéraire de randonnée ».

This practice of role-playing as a visitor for the discovery of tourism knowledge is called ethnomethodology, where you move between being a tourist and being a researcher or travel specialist.

The folding gives a front and back cover and ten boxes for information, 12 small pages or panels in total. The A4-page is upright on both sides so that it will print correctly on a home printer. Use Microsoft Publisher to develop your own 2-sided. 3-fold, 12-panel TGUIDE. A blank version with just the ten headings can be printed and taken out into the field; here are those headings:

REVERSE SIDE

1 Geology and Geomorphology (see Cooper 2012).

2 Architecture of the Built Heritage, often using stone from 1 above.

3 Climate and Geography, will determine high season and shoulder seasons.

4 Terroir, local food and drink determined by soil and climate (1 & 3 above).

5 Restaurants, try them and give recommendations, especially for vegetarians.

6 Hotels, find range and compare their classification against social media sites.

FRONT OF A4-SHEET

7 History and Culture.

8 Adapting to Local Culture.

9 Language and Literature.

10 Travel, Transport and Toilets.

11 Back Cover – your name or team's names

12 THE FRONT COVER – design a name and logo

Out in the field, use your version of the TGUIDE folded sheet, with its headings, to capture your own ten points about the town or area you are studying. You may need to supplement notes on the sheet with field-notes in your notebook. Take photographs of the key points you will make, for example, the terroir of Finistère includes the Oignon de Roscoff, the onions are on sale in Roscoff and the seaside town even has an Onion Museum. Always look out for local museums. They often alert you to local culture and heritage that you can include in your visitor guide. Make sure you can find your correct photograph again by sketching and labelling or by capturing a street sign or shop name in the picture. Annotated sketch maps can help you find your correct photograph again too, from the hundreds on your digital camera or phone.

Download .PUB template from ResearchGate at this short url http://goo.gl/rbk0k5

Please feel free to use our TGUIDE template, please cite our work as:

Chicot, C. & Mansfield, C. (2014) TGUIDE: Finding Finistère [online] Available at https://goo.gl/EgpB1X [Accessed 19.10.14] DOI: 10.13140/2.1.3246.2082