ABSTRACT
Since a long time, tourism education has been a topic of debate in academia and numerous studies have been published about the theme in some of the major international specialised journals (see e.g. Jafari & Ritchie, 1981; Airey & Johnson, 1999; Tribe, 2002). Some parts of the world, however, have been left out of the discussion for several years, as is the case of Latin America, only more recently addressed by Pizam (1999). Also, only a limited number of researchers have approached the topic of tourism education provision in countries of the region, such as Charles (1997), who wrote about the past and future development of tourism and hospitality education and training in the Caribbean region and Knowles, Teixeira, and Egan (2003) who presented a comparison of tourism and hospitality education in Brazil and in the United Kingdom (UK).
