Lost Horizon

"You're studying tourism? Must be an easy course."

Did you get that comment when you came to Leeds for your diploma or degree? Was that what you thought, as well? If you thought so at the start, you didn’t think so at the end. You found it hard work, stressful and challenging. And real, valuable experience.

The LeedsMet course, like others in tourism around the UK, covers a very wide range of subjects and skills. To name a few in no particular order of priority, these include tourism sectors, tourism operations, tourism geography, planning and development, tourist attractions; management and organisation, IT, finance and accounting, marketing, human resource management, public sector policies, issues of the environment, sustainability, the law, cultural and social dynamics, visitor interpretation and urban renewal. Which probably leaves out several more. Given that even in a degree course of three academic years and one spent in industry the range means they can only be taught to undergraduate, it's still a very demanding curriculum. Each of them have theories, research data, case studies, interpretations and debates.

And the list doesn't include skills development in writing reports and essays, working in groups and giving presentations, including some to actual industrial clients.

The implied accusation that you were taking a second-rate course misses out on another important fact: it was a management course and not a tourism studies course. The management training you received gave you the ability to work not only in a wide spectrum of tourism jobs – at management level – but in non-tourism employment as well. The people seen in these photos now work for tour operators, local government tourism departments, tourist attractions, transport operations and tourism consultancies. They also work in the media, computer services, government departments, education, social services, law firms and others. Some run their own businesses. Surveys show repeatedly one of the highest rates of success finding management-level employment amongst any university alumni groups.

We seem to suffer from an ambivalency towards tourism that can be a touch like hypocrisy. There is a lot to criticise about tourism – problems in terms of economics, environmental pressures, cultural erosion, sometimes human exploitation. But can anyone name a broad human activity or an industry where problems like these don’t exist? We have to accept that while we are right to attack the problems that tourism contains, we are usually amongst the most frequent jet-setters and consumers of international tourism with all that that implies about adding to the situation. Which is why tourism management courses build the examination of these issues into their courses, and people who complete them are often the best informed about such concerns. Not always, not necessarily enough, but thanks to the teaching the received, much more aware than most.

If tourism is to be examined, dissected, evaluated – and it needs to be – then it has to be done as objectively as possible. Not through polemic and propaganda – on either side – but through well-informed analysis based on a clear perspective.

We have to stop calling tourism “the world’s biggest industry” – it’s much more than that, it’s a human activity that as often as not runs its course without the buying of commercial packages: visiting friends and relatives, nipping up to the city to shop or look at an exhibition contributes to tourism activity but might only require the purchase of a few tickets or gallons of fuel. People will still eat their three meals a day or whatever: they might or might not go out for a pizza or a curry.

We need to realise that much of what is truly tourism not part of a leisure industry. Most city hotels earn most of their money providing services for industry – overnight stays, conferences, business lunches. They are busiest mid-week and can charge full rate. This is part of tourism, but it’s business tourism.

We need to realise that leisure isn’t sinful. Too many people seem to give the impression that it is, that business travel is alright but leisure travel is not. They seem to think that pleasure, especially anything remotely sensual like sunbathing, eating and drinking, lazing around and shopping for consumer goods is somewhere on the road to perdition.

OK, many people can’t afford to be tourists, or are housebound through illness or infirmity. It’s perfectly true that there are people in the world starving or trapped by war, crime, terrorism and antisocial attitudes. All those problems need solving, but it doesn’t mean that other people must stop eating, drinking, and enjoying entertainment, including travel and tourism. It would do most of us good to cut down on these activities from time to time – maybe all the time – but there are reasons aplenty for continuing to take part in them. Contributing to an economic system is one. Being psychologically and socially well-adjusted is another. And a third is gaining an understanding of the world, its places, people and problems. Tourism can help do those things. It has the potential – it is by no means automatic – to show us the world in a way that all the media, the mass media, education and even the stories told us by our nearest and dearest cannot. Tourism is the only activity which allows us to find out about the world for ourselves, by going places. We need to know our very own horizons and to keep pushing them back, not losing them.

[The discussion continues in The Beckoning Horizon, accessed from the list at the left]

Above: Students from Leeds Metropolitan University on the ramparts of Victoria Citadel, Gozo, 2003.