Abstract:

Tourism industry has created a self-image of fastest-growing and most prominent industry among not completely digital industries relying more on human factor than technological. However, it’s difficult to imagine an industry developing in post-industrial countries that could be out of the reach of information technologies.

So, one of the most important features of the contemporary stage of tourism industry development is its strive to continuously strengthen and expand the impact of IT-technologies at all stages of development, promotion and implementation of tourist products. In this context, the significance of tourism managers’ education and training substantially increases, particularly their ability to use the latest IT-technologies in their professional work.
As it is known, one of the most important components of the tourism industry is the provision of transportation, which is essential not only for travel organization, but also for assurance of the travel quality, safety and efficiency.

Transportation services are also the most complex technological part of tourism product elaboration, as it involves multi-variance, docking and combining different kinds of transportation, overlapping of many customs, administrative, trade and corporate laws and therefore requires a particularly high quality of students’ training for their future professional activities.
One of the key tools for improving the quality of tourism managers’ training is introduction into the curriculum of the course of practical study of the Global

Distribution System «Amadeus», which allows the development of a professional to perform the following tasks:
• acquire information of flight schedules of 710 airlines globally and ticket availability of over 420 airlines, book flights globally and organize air transportation from any destination to any other destinations of the world;
• accumulate required information of accommodation services – apartments and hotel rooms, sorting them out in categories, prices, location, assuring their booking, fixed prices for the booked rooms and preservation of special confidential prices for 110,000 hotels globally;
• organize car rent in 35,380 offices of 30 car rent companies of the world, etc.

While mastering the “Amadeus” system, students acquire the following generic and professional competencies:
- Ability to solve problems of professional activities on the basis of information and communication technologies with the main information security requirements;
- Ability to develop tourist products and organize processes of servicing customers;
- Ability to communicate orally and in writing to solve problems of interpersonal and intercultural communication;
- Ability to work in a team, perceive social, ethnic, religious and cultural differences with tolerance;
- Ability of self-organization and self-education.

The use of global distribution systems as part of tourism managers’ education helps the future specialists to form the following professional skills:
- Experience of travel organization with multi-variant proposals taken into account, in accordance with the air transport market offers, hotels and other enterprises in the tourism and hospitality industries;
- Skills of choosing rational travel options to suit consumers’ individual needs, budget, etc.;
- Experienced in the process of servicing communications with customers, transportation companies, travel agencies, etc.;
- Skills of preparing the required documents for both tourists and service providers.

In a nutshell, the use of global distribution systems in the training of tourism managers allows avoiding narrow specialization by working at various stages of development and implementation of tourist products through the use of a variety of professional technologies while forming the students’ professional orientation.

Keywords:

tourism managers’ education, IT-training, global distribution systems, professional competencies.