Abstract:

Tourism and hospitality education have traditionally relied heavily on practical teaching and learning approaches, focussed on real-word issues and skills and the projection of future graduates’ professional settings and challenges. As a result, simulations and simulation-based learning have become staples of tourism and hospitality management higher education, moving beyond the scope of vocational programmes.

Drawing from experiences carried out in classrooms and laboratories, as well as recent graduates’ perspectives, this paper aims to illustrate how the development of both hard and soft skills can be leveraged by structured hands-on training programs, internships, and work simulation contexts. In addition to a literature review focussing on the key skills required by the labour market and the affordances of practice-based training, authors outline different scenarios that illustrate how simulation is currently being used within tourism and hospitality higher education, crosscutting them with interviews with recent graduates currently working in the industry.

Based on documentary research, observation and content analysis, this research establishes the importance of simulation and metacognition in shaping tourism graduates’ future careers, at the same time it highlights the importance of collaboration and feedback as crucial components of teaching and learning experiences. In addition, by putting forward strategies that range from standalone activities and essentially practical classes to more comprehensive and interdisciplinary processes, that combine theoretical and practical approaches, it also supports other tourism education practitioners and future research within this scope.

Keywords:

Simulation, Hospitality, Tourism, Education, Collaboration, Skills.