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Figure 3. Credit (ECTs) distribution at Bachelor’s degree program.
It can be declared, that the qualification framework and ECTs limit prevent tourism program
from development and making it more diversified and sophisticated. Tourism specialist
must have a broad range of skills and competences (socio-cultural, linguistic, cognitive,
narrow specialization competences), but the national framework creates deteriorating
factor while not allowing it to be focused on narrow disciplines and providing real practice.
Review of worldwide tourism education developments and experiences
Tourism education began as a development of vocational schools in Europe. Gradually, the
interest and demand from the public and private sectors has pushed the growth and
development of tourism education. There are distinguished three main stages of tourism
education development (Airey and Tribe, 2005):
First, there stared a massive increase in the numbers of students, institutions and
teachers of tourism;
Second, the curriculums have broadened beyond the vocational and tourism has
emerged as a subject for at different levels of education;
Third, this rapid growth and change has led to tensions in the development of the
curriculum.
Having all this stages passed through, today European universities enjoy more diversifies
and sophisticated tourism teaching programs and curriculums at HEIs, which are oriented on
development of either - professional as well as intellectual skills. As a result, graduate
students are equipped with knowledge and skills necessary to know what to do, how to do
and how it could be done in more creative way. The focuses of teaching programs are
ranged from general tourism management to specializations in various sectors, even
extremely narrow ones, like e-Tourism (Maurer and Egger, 2014).
Tourism is a complex field of studies. It is just as wide-range, multi-layered and rapidly
changing as the human nature is. While tourism is perceived as a set of business activities or
movements of people, it is also a social phenomenon: “tourism needs to be considered not
just as a type of business or industry, but as a powerful cultural arena and process that both
shapes and is shaped by people, nations and cultures” (Rojek and Urry, 1997). Intercultural
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