Abstract:
Until recently, individuals seeking recognition of their professional standing within the Australian tourism industry had but one
option, membership of the Australian Institute of Travel and Tourism. More recently, employer bodies in several tourism industry
sectors, namely, retail travel, meetings and inbound, have acted to develop individual accreditation schemes designed to confer a level
of professional standing upon individuals working in their respective sectors. This paper begins with an overview of the individual
tourism-related accreditation schemes currently operating in Australia and then moves on to discuss the forces that have led to their
development. Following on from this discussion, the operational difficulties that these programmes have encountered are examined
along with their respective future outlooks. It is argued that there appears to be a certain consistency in the problems faced by existing
programmes and that these difficulties place a question mark over the longer-term viability of at least some of these schemes. These
difficulties, it is suggested, parallel many of the problems being faced by organisation-based accreditation schemes in the tourism
industry. In the final part of this paper, some suggestions are made as to how these problems might be addressed.
