Southwest China's Guizhou Province faces travel promotion problems because of a lack of trained foreign language speaking tour guides.
According to Yang Shengming, director of the Guizhou Provincial Tourism Bureau, the province has a total of 3700 tour guides, but only 7.53% of them can speak a foreign language.
Based on the province's target to receive 1 million inbound tourists each year, it needs at least 1000 foreign language speaking guides by the year of 2010.
In 2005, Guizhou received 31 million domestic tourists, but only 276,000 foreign tourists. The Guizhou Provincial Tourism Bureau says the shortage of foreign language guides is the reason for the small number of foreign tourists.
