Tourism Education : Life Begins at 40

It is difficult to put a precise date on the start of tourism education but, as the author has already commented (Airey 2005b : 13), it was during the 1960s that “a number of key changes in tourism [itself], in education and in society more generally,” led to the emergence of tourism “both as a clear area of study in its own right and as a subject for study to diploma and degree level and for research.” It was during that decade that many of the early tourism programmes began. They are now celebrating their 40 anniversaries. At this milestone it is interesting to reflect on the extent to which tourism education has reached the stage of maturity associated with 40 years. The purpose of this paper is to make this reflection and, in doing so, to explore the ways in which tourism has emerged and changed and, indeed, has matured. It also emphasizes that the development has been neither linear nor unidimensional. One of the fascinations has certainly been the ways and extent to which tourism as a field of study has changed and indeed almost reinvented itself within changing contexts.