ABSTRACT
As already explained in Chapter 2, tourism education in the UK can be said to have begun in 1972 with the introduction of two postgraduate programmes at the Universities of Strathclyde and Surrey. Tourism-related programmes existed before this date, notably for the hospitality sector where there were already bachelor degree as well as diploma programmes (Airey & Tribe, 2000). Tourism was studied as optional components of these and other programmes and it was considered as part of more traditional disciplinary studies. But 1972 marked a change in that for the first time tourism was considered in its own right as a distinct field of study. The first two undergraduate programmes were introduced in 1986. From this early, and very small beginning (there were about 20 students on the two first postgraduate programmes) tourism has now come to occupy a major part of UK further and higher education with up to 40,000 students enrolled on tourism programmes. According to one source, there was “an estimated 375 tourism teachers in 1995 [in higher education] and … more than 250 textbooks and 30 journals” (Airey & Johnson, 1999, p. 229) as well as related conferences, organisations and researchers.
