CHILL MAGAZINE

Caribbean tourism will come under the microscope like never before when regional academics and industry practitioners meet here for the first ever University of the West Indies’ International Tourism Conference from December 9 to 18, 2009.

The event, which is being undertaken in association with the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom, has been entitled: Beyond the Boundary: Creating New Epistemologies in Tourism, and is being organised by the Department of Management Studies at Cave Hill.

Lecturer in Tourism, Dr. Sherma Roberts, explained: “Over the last five to ten years, the field of study called tourism has not grown its own theories in a way that we could really establish ourselves as a firm discipline, and so we are saying that what we need to do is to draw on other disciplinary approaches so that we can evolve and understand the phenomenon called tourism in a better way.

We want to try not only to create knowledge but to challenge current practices and come up with new ways of seeing and doing tourism. We will approach this conference with two streams in view: we have the academic stream that will be drawing on disciplines like political science, engineering, gender, finance, accounting, agriculture, sociology, psychology etc, and we also want to have an industry stream where we sit down with industry people and say … we want to really understand how we can strengthen our tourism product and how we can strengthen the way we have done tourism – intellectualise the process, ground it in research, understand trends and forecasts, rather than doing tourism intuitively.”

Dr. Roberts, who heads the Masters in Tourism Studies programme at Cave Hill, noted that while tourism research and planning appeared “a little more sophisticated” in Barbados and the Cayman Islands, there was a very strong need for the entire region to improve its capacity in this area.

Noting that they anticipate greater partnerships being developed as a result of the conference, Dr. Roberts said, “We expect at the end of the day to bring the UWI centre of the whole tourism debate [so people do not] just see the University as something on the hill ... .It is not a competition with industry practitioners; it is a collaboration. As we go forward and manage different projects, such as how the whole migration movement and integration are affecting tourism, the University will have a greater voice and provide guidance that means something to the practitioners.

Research and Documentation Centre
We also intend to establish a tourism research and documentation centre, so we want to use the conference as a platform to do that. Hopefully, we will get a chair in tourism by then. We also want to launch a book, written and edited by Caribbean scholars, that’s called New Perspectives in Caribbean Tourism. That is a landmark text and it should be given a place in the conference.”

By bringing industry leaders to the discussion table with academics, organisers are also hoping that tourism managers would leave with a better appreciation of the value of the industry-specific education and training being offered at Cave Hill in the BSc. in Hospitality and Tourism and the MSc. in Tourism and Hospitality Management programmes.

“We have crafted both these programmes using a stakeholder approach, so it is really the industry that informed our choice of courses, and dare I say these are quite strong programmes if you line them up against any others in the world. We are offering education that is providing the market and industry with trained minds that can think outside the box, minds that can be creative and innovative in the way they see tourism, people who you can place in any arena and they should be able to manage themselves. We are really hoping the industry will give space to these people so they can make a contribution. They are young, enthusiastic and willing to learn.”

“But,” Dr. Roberts added, “certain traditional approaches need to be adjusted. Our industry has traditionally been an industry where you come up through experience and so a lot of these people do not have any respect for academic thought or ideas, not recognising that what education does is give you conceptual tools. There needs to be much more respect from the industry for academic thought. I think that is why many students find it difficult to break into the field because the industry does not pay enough attention to qualifications in tourism, and that is why it continues to be lowskilled and low-paid.

A tourism person coming out does not command the same salary as an engineer and you have to ask yourself why. We have people running our tourism ministries, and technocrats, who have no tourism training and yet we say this is the lifeblood of our economies. If an engineer were to be hired to build a bridge, you would want to see his credentials , but we do not demand the same training in the tourism industry. We need to revisit that position.”

Tourism practitioners attending the conference can expect to get involved in “practical discussions” on such subjects as cruise tourism, transport, the tourism product, crime (security) and tourism, the social impact of tourism on land use and ownership, and HIV-AIDS and tourism. Additionally, the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with Europe will be given special attention.

The University of the West Indies (UWI), in association with the University of Surrey will be hosting the 1st International Tourism Conference titled ' Beyond the boundary: Creating new epistemologies in Tourism'  at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Bridgetown, Barbados from 8-11 December 2009

Please visit the conference website at  http://www.cavehill.uwi.edu/fss/tourism_conference2009 for further details of the conference.

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