Scholarly record

THE VOCATIONAL TOURISM EDUCATION WITHIN THE PERSPECTIVE OF EUROPEAN UNION AND THE COMPATIBILITY OF THE TURKISH TOURISM EDUCATION

P. Paksoy

Abstract

Tourism is a distinctive labor intensive sector with human as its basic production component since it aims to sell and offer service. As human is the core focus of this sector and service is provided through human beings, training of the people who will be working in the tourism industry becomes vital. Especially the value addition to economy and provision of cultural tolerance enhances the importance of tourism sector not only for developing countries such as Turkey but also for European Union and for the rest of the world. As the European Union countries absorb 68 per cent of the tourism movements (75 per cent of tourism revenues) in Europe and 41 per cent of the total world; the significance of the tourism sector can not be underestimated. Therefore this rapidly growing but previously ignored industry has started to take its attention to the education as education quality will enhance the service and in parallel enable to better cope with the increasing competition. Among the educational systems, vocational tourism education is continuously changing in Europe. For this reason vocational tourism education configuration in European Union is studied in this research. The study consists of three parts. In the first part EU theoretical information about EU’s educational and vocational education programs are studied. In the second part, vocational tourism education in EU is analyzed and in the last section of the study the Turkish vocational tourism education is analyzed within the EU perspective.

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