Abstract:

Tourism is known to be a two-edged phenomenon, seen as both a source of economic prosperity and social development, with unseen before new employment and career opportunities, economic growth and regional development, and simultaneously, it is bound with serious threats including degradation of tourist destinations due to their abuse, seasonality misbalances and vulnerability of local cultures and traditions.

Tourism is seen both as an industry and a system of satisfying consumers’ recreation needs and as such it should serve the harmonious development of individuals, human societies, local and national economies and both the natural and anthropogenic environments.
In order to develop the national and global tourism industries sustainably, the authors believe that the reasonable stakeholders need to identify and develop a system of tourism values to form them as integral part of future tourism employees’ professional personalities and incorporate them as core competencies of their portfolios. Tourism values must therefore meet the harmonious development of tourism for individuals, society, economies and environments.

The authors share TEFI’s system of values for tourism education propped by five pillars: Stewardship, Ethics, Knowledge, Professionalism and Mutual Respect (Mihalič et al. 2015); however, the authors have checked the importance of the values in the opinions of Russian tourism professionals and professionals-to-be and attempted to correlate them with a scope of tourism values identified by the authors.

The methods used to research the interrelation between axiology of tourism and professional higher education include a logical speculative method, observation based on systematic approach, and a survey based on a questionnaire consisting of 15 close, semi-close and open questions intended to identify and check the importance of tourism core values and reveal the respondents’ attitudes to them. The respondents were divided into two groups – a group of tourism professionals, a part of whom are also university lecturers, and university students – tourism professionals-to-be.

The paper further develops the authors’ concept of tourism axiology and explores the relationship between axiology of tourism and professional higher education and highlights the particular values seen as the core of the tourism industry and sustainable development of national economies and societies, as well as the core of professional higher education.

References:
[1] Mihalič, Tanja; Liburd, Janne J.; Guia, Jaume (2015). Values in Tourism: The Case of EMTM. In: Pauline J. Sheldon , Cathy H. C. Hsu (ed.) Tourism Education: Global Issues and Trends (Tourism Social Science Series, Volume 21), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 224 p.

Keywords:

Axiology of tourism, tourism values, values for tourism education, sustainable development, professional education, systematic approach.