CHINESE LANGUAGE SERVICE FOR THAI TEMPLE TOURISM : TAKING WAT PHRA KAEW AS AN EXAMPLE

Abstract

As global tourism is flourishing, temple tourism becomes a crucial part of tourism development plans of several East and Southeast Asian countries. Thailand has rich temple culture, thus it becomes a major destination for tourists who desire to travel to temples. Recently, Thai temple culture has been getting attraction from foreign tourists, especially Chinese tourists. The increasing Chinese tourists are major tourists of Thai tourism. Wat Pra Kaew (Temple of the Emerald Buddha) is selected as a case study of this thesis. The content analysis, survey and participation are applied to analyze reasons and factors making Wat Pra Kaew become a major tourist attraction in Thailand, as well as deeply focus on Chinese language services in Wat Pra Kaew including tourist attraction and tour guide services, evaluate Chinese language usage in such services and eventually summarize problems and propose solutions. The findings indicated that, currently, Chinese language services, both tourist attraction and tour guide, in Thai temple are unable to efficiently respond needs of Chinese tourists. Thai tourism still has inadequate personnel who have knowledge on temple in Chinese language. Chinese language services of Thai temple are required to be improved. In addition, relevant authorities should improve Chinese language services of facilities and develop Chinese language tour guide training courses to enhance service quality of Thai temple tourism.