Career profiles for the travel sector of the tourism industry

Abstract

Tourism is a relative newcomer to the academic repertoire and literature on the subject revealed a plethora of issues which need to be addressed when offering training programmes in tourism and hospitality studies. One of the most significant problems is the fact that tourism educators, guided by their individual biases, design tourism curricula with little or no input from industry. The aim of the study was to determine career profiles for travel agents, tour operators and tourist guides, by identifying the necessary skills and the ideal personality traits people working in these sectors should have. As the emphasis of the B Tech: Tourism Management which is offered by a number of technikons in South Africa, is on the travel sector of the tourism industry, one of the objectives of this study was to analyse this programme. A comparison was drawn with qualifications developed internationally in conjunction with industry, in order to ascertain whether the programme addresses the educational clusters identified by the literature study. A two-pronged approach was followed: a literature study as well as a survey. For the survey a questionnaire, covering a wide range of variables divided into eight categories, was used to obtain the opinions of travel agents, tour operators and tourist guides. The surveys were conducted as structured telephonic interviews with representatives of cities and towns in Gauteng. A proportional random sample was drawn from the membership of registered ASATA travel agencies, registered ASATA outbound tour operators and SATOUR accredited tourist guides. Respondents had to rate the identified skills as to their importance for inclusion in a tourism curriculum suitable for the education and training of employees for their sector of the tourism industry. The majority of respondents in all three sectors agreed that almost all the identified skills should be included, while only the tourist guide sector was in favour of generic courses with limited specialisation.