1. Rationale of the course

 Tourism is essentially a private affair. It depends on travel decisions of individuals and households. The market, a social institution based on implicit moral rules, provides highly sophisticated and diversified tourism related goods and services affordable for everybody in advanced economies. Tourism is also a private engine of redistribution of income and employment from rich to poor places and regions.   

 Nobody can nevertheless ignore the public dimension of tourism. States are the institutions which guarantee freedom of travel. Their governments introduced paid leaves for their citizens what popularized tourism in industrial and postmodern societies. They promote the tourism sector in cases of significant market inadequacies. They stimulate tourism growth in structurally weak regions such as nature near or rural regions, abandoned industrial zones or left inner cities. The largely shared agreement of the international community that tourism must go both ways contributes to develop emerging and developing countries.

 Tourism is not an autonomous sector. It has a cross-cutting nature and impacts on all areas of life. It relies on markets with continuous growth, price stability and strong currencies. Tourism benefits from welfare states which have sufficient budgets for putting forward functioning transport infrastructures, protected monuments and landscapes, good sanitary conditions, safety and security. It has to pay for these goods provided by states in form of increasing regulations which limit tourism growth and development. 

 The dependence of tourism on the state and the frequent public-private partnerships in the field of tourism obliges tourism scientists, experts and managers to know how politics functions. A course on tourism policy may also help students to find attractive jobs, not only in the field of tourism related industries but also in tourism organisations, professional federations and public administrations on local, regional and national level.

2. Programme of the course

 The  course deals with the following issues:

 Fundamentals of tourism policy

• Strategic tourism policy
• Major instruments of tourism policy

2. Institutional framework conditions of tourism

• Market order and macro-economic data
• Political principles of liberal democracies

3. The strategic importance of tourism for the world economy

• Globalisation and emergence of the international travel & tourism industry
• International exchanges, level of development and poverty alleviation

4. World order and intergovernmental cooperation

• Basic principles of international relations
• Rule based intergovernmental cooperation or supremacy

 Major challenges of the international tourism industry

• Vulnerability and resilience to exogenous shocks and crises
• Job creation, labour shortage and productivity
• International tourism and spaceship earth

3. Didactic material and exam

 The professor will provide students with the following documents:

• Slides of his presentations with exhaustive texts and graph based on his publications and experience;  
• An exercise book including the cases to be discussed and solved by the students;
• A glossary with the major notions of the course for the preparation of the written exam.

 Exam procedure

• During the course: Students have to defend orally their solutions to cases presented by the professor.  
• At the end of the course: Students must pass at the course a written exam in form of right-wrong test.  

5. Dates

 Full day courses with physical presence will take place September 27/28/29 and December 15/16 2022. Three full day digital courses will be scheduled at dates to be determined.