Consortium secures funding to improve Tourism Education in Europe

Faced with declining student numbers in higher education tourism programmes, a consortium of four European universities, including the University of Coimbra (UC), is developing The Future of Tourism Education (TourEdu) project.

TourEdu seeks to support higher education institutions in implementing stronger educational programmes, thereby improving the training of tourism professionals.

At the University of Coimbra, the project is coordinated by Carlos Cardoso Ferreira and Cláudia Seabra, both lecturers at the Geography and Tourism Department of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities (FLUC), who explain that “the provision of tourism education programmes has been decreasing and/or being restructured across Europe due to a gradual decline in student numbers.”

The FLUC professors emphasise that this trend “is a growing concern for the tourism sector, as the number of qualified professionals available is decreasing, while tourism continues to expand.”

Carlos Cardoso Ferreira and Cláudia Seabra say that TourEdu, which runs until 2028, aims “to help reverse this trend by developing proposals for a more flexible educational offer targeting both young people and adults already in the job market”

To achieve this, the project will undertake several activities, including “mapping the skills needed in tourism and hospitality roles and developing alternative educational approaches for tourism studies, creating and evaluating training pathways better adapted to current and future employment needs in the sector, while also being more inclusive and learner-centred,” the UC lecturers reveal.

At the same time, as Carlos Cardoso Ferreira and Cláudia Seabra explain, TourEdu also aims to "promote innovative and co-creative dynamics in the development of teaching and training methods in the tourism and hospitality sector".

“The UC team will participate in all project workgroups, leading Group 3, which will focus on the co-creation and evaluation of new training approaches in tourism,” the lecturers add.

TourEdu is funded by the Erasmus+ Programme under KA220-HED – Cooperation Partnerships in Higher Education. The project has a budget of €400,000 and is led by the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. In addition to UC, the consortium includes Turku University of Applied Sciences (Finland) and Business Academy SouthWest (Denmark).