Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
conference in Poland in 1995. Today there are
22 ATLAS members in the new member states
or in prospective accession countries.
There has been a significant expansion of
tourism education in most of the countries in the
New Europe. For example, in Romania there
are now 15 universities (12 public and three
private) offering tourism courses, compared
with one before 1990 (Cristureanu, 1996). Up
until 1994, Slovenia only had tourism educa-
tion at vocational, post-secondary school level,
in spite of tourism being one of the most impor-
tant sectors of the economy. Today, there are
three
education systems designed for a command
economy with a market-based system. It was
not surprising, therefore, that the main areas
of discussion at the 1995 ATLAS conference
revolved around the need for marketing and
management education, and the transfer of
'know-how' from West to East.
As noted in the proceedings of the 1995
ATLAS conference:
There is a pressing need to improve and
extend the provision of tourism education and
training in Central and Eastern Europe, in order
to improve and upgrade the quality and
effectiveness of tourism services. Although a
well-developed system of tourism education
existed in many countries during the
Communist period, the focus of tourism
education was often on spatial planning or
economics, and did not have the management
focus so common in tourism education
elsewhere.
higher
education
institutions
offering
courses in tourism and hospitality.
The major driver for change in the former
Communist states has of course been the transi-
tion to a market economy and increasing diversi-
fication and specialization of tourism products
that this has stimulated. Specialization has also
been stimulated by rising tourism demand and
the growth in repeat visits to the region. How-
ever, more recently, as in the rest of the EU,
curricula have had to be changed in line with
EU guidelines, and the process of fitting courses
into the Bologna Framework is now well under
way in most of the new member states. Many of
the former Communist states already started
replacing their old higher education systems
with the two-cycle Bachelor-Master system in
the early 1990s. Today, most countries have
adopted the European Credit Transfer System
(ECTS) and are now introducing the diploma
supplement as agreed under the Bologna
Declaration of the EU (EURYDICE, 2005).
The extent of tourism education provision,
just as in the rest of Europe, varies considerably
from one country to another. Historic factors and
the relative importance of tourism in the national
economy still have a considerable influence. The
following section considers some of the patterns
of tourism curricula in the former Communist
states and then in Cyprus and Malta.
(Richards, 1996a: 12)
In Poland, for example, Jung and
Mierzejewska (1996, p. 67) noted the following
weaknesses in Polish curricula:
Higher tourism education in Poland still largely
suffers from a clear lack of focus. In tradition,
it was activity-orientated (preparation for
'animators' of social and qualified tourism),
spatially-orientated (preparation of spatial
planners specialised in tourism and
recreation . . .) or functionally-orientated
(administrators of state-owned hotels and
travel agencies).
Thanks to an extensive process of educa-
tional development, however, these days basic
curricula in the new member states do not differ
much from those in the rest of the EU. By and
large, management and marketing form impor-
tant elements of tourism courses, which tend to
be based on a business studies or management
core. For example, in Slovenia, Turistica College
in the resort town of Portoroz offers a BA in
tourism with a business core and a strong lan-
guage element. Students can take up to three
languages and have units in management,
finance, HRM and marketing, as well as tourism
units in subjects such as tourism geography,
tourism economics and event management (see
Table 5.1).
However, some differences are observable.
For example, there is a much stronger linkage
Curricula
Former communist states
In the transition from Communism in the early
1990s, the countries of Central and Eastern
Europe were mainly concerned with replacing
