Professor David Airey

Tourism is much more than an economic sector, it is also a social, cultural, political, and environmental force that drives societal change. Understanding, responding to, and managing this change will inevitably require knowledge workers who are able to address a range of problems associated with tourism, travel, hospitality, and the increasingly complex operating environment within which they exist.The purpose of this Handbook is to provide an insightful and authoritative account of the various issues that are shaping the higher educational world of tourism, hospitality and events education and to highlight the creative, inventive and innovative ways that educators are responding to these issues. It takes as its central focus a dynamic curriculum space shaped by internal and external factors from global to local scales, a variety of values and perspectives contributed by a range of stakeholders, and shifting philosophies about education policy, pedagogy and teaching practice. A benchmark for future curriculum design and development, it critically reviews the development of conceptual and theoretical approaches to tourism and hospitality education. The Handbook is composed of contributions from specialists in the field, is interdisciplinary in coverage and international in scope through its authorship and content. Providing a systematic guide to the current state of knowledge on tourism and hospitality education and its future direction this is essential reading for students, researchers and academics in Tourism, Hospitality, Events, Recreation and Leisure Studies.

This paper reports on the findings of a study conducted by the University of Surrey for DIME, a project funded by the European Social fund (ESF). The purpose of the study was to investigate the owners' or managers' perceptions of Small and Medium Tourism and Hospitality Enterprises (SMTHEs) in UK regarding the impact of multimedia in the following aspects of employment: employment levels; nature and content of work as well as amount of workload; work satisfaction; skill requirements; and work status and remuneration. Overall 233 responses were received, broken down as follows: tourist information centres (n=151), 3* hotels (n=40), and B&B's (n=42). Research findings revealed that multimedia technologies are increasingly being adopted and used by tourism and hospitality businesses. The adoption is "system-wide" affecting the operations and competitiveness of all players. However, it appears that multimedia use has caused limited changes in the structure of organizations as well as in the employment levels and activities

Tourism research has come a long way since the first developments in the identification and delineation of a tourism subject area in the mid 1960s.

Over the last forty years, education related to tourism has become established as a notable and distinct part of the repertoire of higher education. It now has a community of scholars, a body of research, journals and books and many national and international organisations. Numbers of students taking up tourism programmes has also been growing. All this suggests that the tourism academic community should feel fairly confident about their position. This is not entirely the case. This paper explores the uncertainties of tourism in higher education, both the teething problems associated with the recognition of a new area of study as well as the more fundamental issues related to the nature of tourism knowledge.

Tourism is much more than an economic sector, it is also a social, cultural, political, and environmental force that drives societal change. Understanding, responding to, and managing this change will inevitably require knowledge workers who are able to address a range of problems associated with tourism, travel, hospitality, and the increasingly complex operating environment within which they exist. The purpose of this Handbook is to provide an insightful and authoritative account of the various issues that are shaping the higher educational world of tourism, hospitality and events education and to highlight the creative, inventive and innovative ways that educators are responding to these issues. It takes as its central focus a dynamic curriculum space shaped by internal and external factors from global to local scales, a variety of values and perspectives contributed by a range of stakeholders, and shifting philosophies about education policy, pedagogy and teaching practice. A benchmark for future curriculum design and development, it critically reviews the development of conceptual and theoretical approaches to tourism and hospitality education. The Handbook is composed of contributions from specialists in the field, is interdisciplinary in coverage and international in scope through its authorship and content. Providing a systematic guide to the current state of knowledge on tourism and hospitality education and its future direction this is essential reading for students, researchers and academics in Tourism, Hospitality, Events, Recreation and Leisure Studies.

This article deploys poststructuralist discourse theory to examine ideological influences in tourism higher education in England. It foregrounds neoliberalism and managerialism circulating from government policy to higher education institutions and illustrates how the notions of competition, markets, performativity and quality assurance, commonly associated with industry and commerce, converge in tourism higher education. It highlights the role of power in mediating the relationship between tourism higher education and institutions responsible for producing and disseminating the texts analyzed. It. points to the discursive construction of tourism higher education in England and concludes by posing the question: to what extent has this state of affairs contributed to furthering its venerability within the broader higher education academe?

Cultural Heritage is a new title in the Routledge Major Works series, Critical Conceptsin Media and Cultural Studies .

An adapted version of the CourseExperienceQuestionnaire (CEQ) was administered to tourismmanagement students at two technological educational institutes in Greece. This questionnaire has been previously utilised with students taking tourism-related degree courses in the United Kingdom. The analyses presented herein focus on the psychometric properties of the adopted research instrument with the purpose of testing its applicability in the context of tourism higher education in Greece. The results suggest that the CEQ demonstrated an appropriate five-factor structure, satisfactory internal consistency and appropriate relationships with students' rating of their overall satisfaction. Limitations of and directions for future research are discussed.

This study uses a gravity framework to model tourism demand for the Caribbean. The basic model is augmented by Linder?s hypothesis?tourist flows are partly determined by the similarity in preferences between the destination and source markets?and climate distance, which measures the gap between climate conditions in origin and destination countries. The results indicate that traditional gravity variables are significant in explaining demand for the region. Habit persistence has the largest impact on demand, a result that holds promise for regional policy makers. Evidence is also unearthed that similarity in preferences between the region and its source markets, as well as climate distance, are important demand determinants.

Despite the continuous increase of investment in information and communication technologies (ICT) in the tourism industry, empirical studies have not persuasively established corresponding increases in productivity. Indeed several shortcomings have been identified in past studies. This study proposes a new way of assessing ICT productivity. The methodology is tested in a data set from the three-star hotel sector in the United Kingdom using a nonparametric technique called data envelopment analysis (DEA). Empirical findings reveal that productivity gains accrue not from investments per se, but from the full exploitation of the ICT networking and informationalization capabilities. A model for managing ICT applications and benefits is proposed. © 2004 Sage Publications.

Low productivity within service industries has been a major concerti, but this situation is unlikely to improve without a general change in the way productivity is measured and managed. This paper aims to illustrate the value of stepwise data envelopment analysis (DEA) for measuring and benchmarking productivity. The issues and problems regarding productivity measurement as well as the advantages of using DEA in productivity measurement are analysed. The article extends current DEA applications by developing a stepwise approach to DEA. The latter technique combines correlation and DEA analysis for developing robust models and sound productivity measurement. The advantages of the proposed methodology are illustrated by applying it to a dataset of three-star hotels in the UK. Six inputs and three outputs are identified as the factors affecting rooms division efficiency in three star hotels.

Mieczkowski's work (1981), has been used by scholars and educators in the field of tourism to describe the relationships between recreation, leisure and tourism to provide a theoretical framework for tourism. The aim of this paper is to illustrate that another element needs to be added, namely the tourists' perception of time as 'free' or 'non-free'. It is suggested that tourists' perception of the time-frame in which their experience takes place, whether the time is viewed as 'leisure' and 'free-time' or 'non-free time', is of key importance in understanding tourism as a social phenomenon. It is also argued that improved understanding of the tourists' perception of this time-frame provides a new basis for segmenting tourists and identifying tourism subgroups. This, in turn, can contribute to the body of theory related to tourism and to the management of tourist-related organizations.

This book is an essential reference work for all tourism departments and libraries; those planning, developing and delivering tourism courses; those studying ...

The formal study of tourism as a distinct subject in the academy is about 40 years old, the same age as Tourism Recreation Research. Over these 40 years, it has shown remarkable growth and development and in the process has changed and adapted. This paper, drawing inter alia on the author's own 40 years in the tourism academy and on his writings over the period, plots the past, present and future of tourism studies. The paper begins with the vocational origins and the rapid changes that brought tourism to a kind of maturity to take its place alongside other social sciences as a subject for research and teaching. It then explores the tensions and challenges that it has faced in more recent years as global competition has forced universities to focus more on their finances and reputations. In this environment, influenced by performance against various metrics, the position of tourism in the academy has been challenging. The paper then turns to consider the current problems created by a metrics driven agenda and how there is an opportunity for tourism to meet the needs of a post-industrial world by focusing not on immediate metrics but on the characteristics that tourism offers as a complex area of study.

This study discusses the complex nature of visitors' evaluation of an historical district, and proposes a theoretical framework and qualitative methods to elicit relations between visitors' mental states and the district's features. The combination of Repertory Grid Analysis and Laddering Analysis with the use of photographs as stimuli is discussed and demonstrated. Results show that these methods can shed light on the varied nature of visitors' evaluation. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The article reports a study of labor mobility into tourism that attempts to replicate the findings of previous research conducted in a different setting. Data was collected from an urban and a rural region of the United Kingdom on mobility patterns, orientations to tourism employment, and the impacts of the change. The study supports the findings of the previous work but found no significant differences between the rural and the urban experience of mobility. Tourism employment as a "way of life" received support from the evidence that people were prepared to surrender education-occupation compatibility in return for a more self-controlled work-life relationship.

Tourism research has come a long way since the first developments in the identification and delineation of a tourism subject area in the mid 1960s.

One Such Trailbrazer Was Walt Disney, The Man Who Created Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, AndMany Other Memorable Characters.

This paper explores the role of public policy in the development of tourism in Jamaica. It focuses on two separate and contrasting periods. In the first, 1972?80, referred to here as 'The Socialist Era', the Jamaican government pursued goals of self-reliance combined with seeking to integrate tourism into Jamaican life. In the second period, 1980?89, 'The Period of Capitalism', emphasis was shifted to reducing government intervention and pursuing foreign exchange earnings. A comparison of tourism development during these two periods reveals that during the 'Socialist Era' some success was achieved in the Jamaicanisation of tourism but at the same time government policies contributed to an overall decline in the industry as measured by the traditional indicators of tourist arrivals, hotel occupancy, hotel provision and employment. During the 'Period of Capitalism' a change in policy is associated with a successful recovery of tourism numbers but an increasing tension between locals and tourists. The study cannot provide causal explanations of the links between policy shifts and tourism development. The wide range of external variables, including oil crises and world inflation, that occurred during the periods is too great to admit this kind of certainty. However, the policy background provides an important context for understanding the link between policy and development in one of the oldest and most well-developed tourist destinations in the Caribbean.

The paper challenges the idea that heritage tourism is simply represented by tourists at heritage attractions and suggests rather that perceptions more properly lie at its core. Relationships among four groups of variables (personal characteristics, site attributes, awareness, perceptions), and behavior (before, during, and after) are investigated. The results indicate that the perception of a place as part of personal heritage is associated with the visitation patterns. In particular those who view a place as bound up with their own heritage are likely to behave significantly differently from others. Understanding this is useful for the study of tourists' behavior and for the management of sites.

The purpose of this Handbook is to provide an insightful and authoritative account of the various issues that are shaping the higher educational world of tourism, hospitality and events education and to highlight the creative, inventive and ...

Tourism has been studied and researched in higher education for more than 40 years and in many ways it has now established itself as a significant part of the academy. However, at a time of change and rationalization in higher education, tourism, along with other areas of study, needs to be able to justify its position. Increasingly, academic managers are seeking such justifications, often using readily available metrics. The purpose of this study is to examine the position of tourism using these same metrics, for teaching, research, and impact and for three different countries, Australia, China, and the United Kingdom. In doing so, it highlights tourism?s strengths and weaknesses from a managerial perspective but at the same time it exposes the relative narrowness of this managerial gaze. It points to the need for the tourism community to strengthen its provision and broaden the gaze of the decision makers.

Purpose ? The purpose of this research is to investigate the wine tourism experience from the perspective of Generation Z adults in Greece, following an actual winery visit.

Design/methodology/approach ? Responses were obtained from a total of 306 respondents drawn from student groups visiting a winery in the Achaia region of the Peloponnese, Western Greece, using convenience sampling. A list of winescape attributes was adopted for testing and used to structure selfadministered questionnaires. The data collected were analysed using a factoranalytic and Importance-Performance Analysis framework.

Findings ? Five factors that promote understanding of the desired wine tourism experience of Generation Z adults were identified, namely: Cost Considerations and Wine & Entertainment both perceived to be important but the winery?s performance on the same was poor; Destination Attributes and Service Staff both perceived to be important with good performance; and Learning about Wine perceived unimportant with low performance.

Originality/value ? This is the first academic study focusing specifically on the winery experience from the perspective of Generation Z. As such it has provided new and useful insights for researchers and managers in the wine industry concerning the experience of this under-researched generational cohort.

Purpose: This paper explores perceptions of tourism theory and its usefulness to the professional practice of tourism management as identified by the two major stakeholder groups ? academics and tourism practitioners.

Design/methodology/approach: Data for this study were collected through the use of two electronically administered surveys with tourism academics teaching on undergraduate tourism programmes of study and tourism professionals, both based in the UK.

Findings: Findings suggest that tourism theory is important in understanding tourism itself. But at the same time it has pragmatic relevance, facilitating researchers and others to make sense of the real world and contributing to successful practice in tourism.

Originality/value: This is the first study to provide empirical data from both academic and practitioner perspectives into often contested debates about the nature and uses of tourism theory.