Getting Ahead of the Curve with a Travel and Tourism Diploma
What is a travel and tourism diploma? It’s a pretty loose term covering a whole range of tourism studies, which tend to be targeted towards particular segments of the industry as well as its more generalised aspects. In this sense it resembles the classic university or college course, giving candidates grounding, both in basic travel and tourism theory and a good footing in an area of special expertise.
The idea is to prepare future travel and tourism employees by making them thoroughly conversant with the ideas behind the business. A travel and tourism diploma, then, will fit prospective job candidates for their chosen career, in the first instance, by weeding out the people who don’t really want to do it. The first parts of tourism studies courses (which can be done selectively online at sites like Online Travel Training, an industry funded travel job agency) give candidates an overview of the basic philosophies connecting all trade in the industry: customer service, hospitality and entertainment. Once these pre-requisite skills have been learned the candidate is ready to start turning his or her attention to the specific areas of the travel and tourism industry in which he or she is thinking of working.
A good example here is airlines. The Online Travel Training site, for example, runs travel and tourism diploma courses for most of the major airlines and air alliances. Each course is designed to let candidates in on the broader practices of all airlines (including ticketing, reservations and special meals requirements) as well as the individual habits of the airline sponsoring the course. This kind of directed tourism studies is ideal both for prospective employee and potential employer. The employee learns a great deal of information about the company they think they might like to work for – which gives them a better idea of whether or not they really do want to work for them – and the employer gets a guarantee, by “weeding out” the less enthusiastic through the course, that the candidates it finally receives for interview will genuinely be looking for a career with them.
The travel and tourism diploma, then, in all its guises, protects both sides of the industry (employer and employee) from wasting time and money. As such, it’s a reasonably unique initiative. Tourism studies, done through directed modules like the airline courses discussed above are a kind of compromise between university type courses (where a person may never work out whether he or she is doing something they really want to do) and blind on the job training. Effectively, these studies deliver on the job training before a job is ever given – the perfect way to ensure that one’s candidates start their work at a high level of competence and to discourage those predisposed to slack from ever entering the industry.
Good news for genuine candidates, then. A travel and tourism diploma will guarantee marks for enthusiasm and dedication in any interview. Taking tourism studies off one’s own bat is the ideal way to prove to a prospective employer that one is serious about the job: and in the competitive world of the hospitality and travel trade, that’s a big help up.
A travel and tourism diploma is a great way to direct one’s tourism studies into the career path one desires, getting on the job training before even starting work. For more information please visit http://www.onlinetraveltraining.co.uk/.
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Geography of Travel & Tourism
If you are adventurous in your travel or are interested in knowing more than what is found in travel brochures, this book makes for interesting reading. It gives a basic geographic overview of the world and each major geographic region, providing insights about the geographic character of specific regions to show how it establishes a setting for tourism. All regions or countries have a brief overview of the cultural, physical, and tourism characteristics of the region or country. The cultural
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Review by Jennifer Lynn Davis for Geography of Travel & Tourism
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The item was exactly as described. The book arrived in a very timely manner. One of the best textbook buying experiences I’ve had!
Review by richard t. jackson for Geography of Travel & Tourism
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I recently spent New Year’s Eve on top of a gale- and rain-swept volcano in the southern Philippines. Compared to that wet, muddy night, this text comes in a distant second. It never ceases to amaze me that almost any truly fascinating subject, when moulded into a textbook, can be made to appear overwhelming tedious. Many geographers (including the present reviewer way back in 1969) have tried to get their heads round what appears to be the obvious relevance of their discipline to the world’s biggest industry – tourism; all have failed – at least to make what they have to say about the connection interesting. This, I regret to say, doesn’t make a much better job of the task than its predecessors. I suspect that the reason is that geographers, on the whole, have not taken on board the concept of ‘relative geography’ – a geography in which distance is measured not in kilometres and miles but in dollars. Once that is accepted then it becomes evident that distances vary depending on the disposable income available to one and the map of the world becomes radically transformed generating quite new insights into how humans use space. To be fair to the authors, this book is probably the best available so far – it is far ranging in its coverage; has a good writing style; is well illustrated; and is as up-to-date as any non-electronic publication can be (though that’s not saying a great deal). But exactly who will buy it? Tourism students really don’t need to – tourism is not at all about geography but marketing and human/personnel skills. And the general reader isn’t going to find too much inspiration here – unless they are stuck on top of a galeswept mountain in Mindanao