Abstract
Tourism education has changed almost beyond recognition since the first issue in November 1973 of Annals of Tourism Research. In that issue, planned as the first of a monthly publication, there is no direct mention of education (or of teaching or curriculum, or training or theory or other related words) although the issue does contain a bibliography of recent tourism books and it alerts readers to the program in hotel, restaurant and tourism at the University of University of Wisconsin-Stout. Tourism education as such does not appear until volume 1 issue 5 in March 1974 with an article about the International Centre for Advanced Tourism Studies, followed later, in 1975, with a piece from the editor (Jafari, 1975) reporting on a planned mapping exercise of tourism programs. Except for an occasional book review this is all until 1978, by which time the journal had settled into four issues a year, when the first consideration related to tourism education appeared in the form of a brief, two page, discussion about tourism theory (Buck, 1978). After this the pace quickened with the first substantive articles by Pearce (1978) and Leiper (1978) before the first major contribution to the field generally appeared in 1981 in the form of a special issue of eight full articles and three short communications devoted to tourism education. This special issue had its origins in 1977 when according to the editor (Jafari, 1981) he, along with 70 tourism educators, attended a session on tourism education at a conference in Ottawa, Canada.