Industry has bad attitude to graduates, says expert

Bridget Major, a senior lecturer in travel and tourism at Northumbria University has hit back at reports in the travel trade press headlined: “Axe your staff and employ graduates”.

The article appears on the front page of this week’s Travel Trade Gazette and follows a presentation by Ms Major at the ITT conference in Qatar.

She told TravelMole: “It is disappointing that TTG have chosen to interpret my presentation at the ITT conference in such an unrepresentative way.”

During Ms Major’s presentation at ITT, she said that the industry should do more to employ and retain graduates. She suggested that companies across travel and tourism up-skill and recruit a graduate. “My comment about ‘Try one for the price of two’ was related to recruitment, not redundancy”, Ms Major told TravelMole.

She added: “What I also said in the presentation was that not all staff need to be graduates.”

Ms Major says that the industry commentary used in the TTG article (which included an agent who reported a bad experience with employing an undergraduate on work experience) was only from the retail industry. She says her presentation was aimed at the industry as a whole.

“Only 24% of the research respondents worked in travel agencies” Ms Major told TravelMole. The research she is referring to is the tracking of travel and tourism graduates over the last four years.

Ms Major found that 50% of graduates she spoke to were leaving the industry within four years. Low pay (52% start on a salary under £13,000) and lack of career inducements were among the reasons for leaving the industry.

“The travel industry seems to think there is something elitist about having a degree, but that simply isn’t the case any more. Given the changing nature of the industry and of education the industry should look towards recruiting graduates.”

“I think it is partly to do with the attitude in the industry that the best employees will work themselves up from the bottom. But the way travel and tourism degrees have developed means many graduates enter the workforce with work experience and with skills to enable lateral thinking.”

The presentation included some detail on which companies have fast track graduate training programmes in place. According to Ms Major Thomas Cook had 600 graduates applying for 12 places on such schemes and TUI will take on about 13 graduates on its scheme, to join its staff of around 18,000 in the UK.

The ITT conference in Qatar also featured a presentation from Alistair Campbell who spoke about the importance of accurate reporting by the media. He slammed certain national newspapers for sensationalising events and misleading the public.