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Assuring quality in tourism and hospitality management high education – Croatia case study

Major structural changes within tourism and hospitality industries have brought a need for new forms of management and new managerial skills. This paper argues that tourism and hospitality management education institutions must rethink the structure and content of their courses as well as teaching processes and methods to respond to the changing nature od managerial work and to improve job prospects of students. They should develop their programs to more edequately reflellct the interdisciplinary character of tourism and hospitality management. The paper first explores the issues of quality assurance in tourism and hospitality management education as an important instrument to meet these demands. Special attention is paid on the question of how the concepts of Total Quality Management and ISO 9000 (the international standards for quality management) can best be applied to higher education institutions in tourism and hospitality management. High education institutions, institutionally predetemined to create and transfer knowledge, are the places where knowledge is really acquired, so that it is necessary to control, using statistical instruments, the efficacy and effectiveness of their process and the compatibility of obtained process results and goals. The Statistical Process Control, as the instrument of process improvement, should guarantee obtaining of information necessary for programming of the educational process elements and encouraging the educational system itself with the purpose of high standards achievement. The assumption in this paper is that the Croatian institutions of high education have to adopt the statistical process control understood as a specific managerial approach as soon as possible in order to successfully identify the key process variables and manage the incongruent process results. This paper present the result of the research conducted at The Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality Management, Opatija, the only high education institution in Croatia completely oriented to the education of managers in tourism and hospitality industry. The research was conducted using the methods of the statistical process control, to investigate the cycle of the undergraduate programs and its processes, the dynamics of tha study, the quality of the students, the capability of the processes to meet the needs, wishes and expectations of student as users as well as the average evaluation of the satisfaction with the educational process in whole. Subsequently, a comparative analysis of degree programs in tourism and hospitality management in Croatia universities and universities in USA and Europe is presented. Such an analysis form the basis for a discussion of problems surrounding the efforts for international harmonization of tourism and hospitality management education. Finally, he conclusions and reccommendations underscore the need for and usefulness of soundly grounded approach to the assurance of quality and international standards (flexibile) in higher education institutions in tourism and hospitality management.

education, total quality management, process, statistical process control, hospitality industry, educational process, Croatia.

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