| dc.description.abstract | This study was carried out to assess the benefits and challenges of managing different clientele by tourism businesses in selected tour companies in Kampala, the objectives that guided the study were: To identify the different categories of tourists in Uganda and particularly Kampala, examine how these different categories of tourists are managed to find out challenges of handling the different categories of tourists and to suggest solutions. A sample size of 60 respondents was obtained and included 50 tour companies and 10 tourists and was selected by use of both simple random and purposive sampling techniques. The data was collected using questionnaires and focus group discussions. And data was analyzed quantitatively using SPSS and qualitatively using thematic analysis. Data analyzed revealed different services provided by the companies include guiding services, designing itinerary for tourists, ticketing and providing information to tourists about the destination. The study further revealed that companies receive different categories of tourists/travellers which were reported to be leisure and holiday tourists, business and professional tourists, tourist visiting friends and families. Additionally, tour companies have managed these visitors by providing them with detailed itineraries, providing better customer care services, provision of good quality transport services and allocating those experienced guides. Despite the promising ways how tour companies manage different tourist levels, it was found out that there exist a number of problems that these companies face when handling different clients which were identified as limited funds in meeting tourist demands, lack of tourism /tourist demand awareness, lack of strategic planners and poor itineraries. The study further revealed that such challenges can be solved through sensitization of both parties, employing of trained guides, better road constructions and being authentic when designing the itineraries is of great importance .It was from these findings that the study recommends the need to train guides in different foreign languages in order to serve all the travellers/tourists from different regions of the world because the study found that some of the tour guides were not well trained in different foreign language, that the private operators should seek funds to effectively fund there operations in meeting clients expectations and this can be done through patterning with government tourism agencies or through their fellow tour operators as it was revealed that poor funding is seriously facing the tour companies in their operations and that there is need to effectively create awareness campaigns on the travelers/clients because some of the clients from the results were not well versed with company guidelines which sometimes could lead to breaking rules of tour companies | en_US |
