ABSTRACT
Tourism's most valuable asset in Higher Education (HE) is arguably the Tourism teacher. This is, perhaps, ironic when faced with the fact that those who teach Tourism in HE have yet to be the subject themselves of any significant body of research. In the mid-1990s Middleton and Ladkin (1996) estimated that there were approximately 375 full time lecturers in Tourism in the UK (compared to 200 in 1993) with an additional 950 full- or part-time lecturers who contributed in some way to the ‘conduct’ of Tourism courses. There have been no published attempts since to establish the number of Tourism lecturers in UK institutions of higher education (IHE). In addition, Snaith and Miller (1999) noted very high levels of movement within the Tourism academic community and little awareness of newly departed/arriving lecturers by institutions and departments, a fact that probably accounts for the lack of accurate data regarding the size and scope of the Tourism-teaching community.
