Tourism education for destination success: a Caribbean perspective

Abstract

ABSTRACT Higher education and its ability to produce a high quality, specialized labour force is vital to Caribbean destinations and their ability to innovate and remain highly competitive in the global tourism market. The purpose of this paper is to engage in exploratory research to determine the extent to which Caribbean tertiary institutions are educating for destination success. The tourism curricula of six institutions across the English-speaking Caribbean were evaluated using content analysis. The study disclosed that there is good alignment between the tourism curricula across the region and the definers of destination success. However, urgent consideration must be given to reshaping the curricula to provide a better balance between knowledge acquisition, knowledge creation, knowledge application and knowledge transformation.