On Legal Competence of Bachelors and Masters in Tourism

Abstract

The article presents the author’s perspective on the content of legal training as part of the undergraduate
 and graduate education in tourism-related disciplines and as implemented in the framework of the new
 (3+) generation of standards. The authors substantiate the expediency of the «Legal groundwork for the
 tourism industry» course development. The authors proceed from the premise that law-related courses have
 always been generally considered to be the most challenging both for the faculty (as their teaching requires faculty members to be qualified instructors and legal practitioners actively engaged in research concerning
 legal regulation in the tourism industry) and the students, which brought a majority of HE institutions to
 consciously exclude the course from the curriculum or to replace it by other less law-specific courses. The
 authors of the article make a case of a complex approach to and consideration of the major issues linked to
 the legal groundwork for tourism activity, the development and implementation of the federal and regional
 tourism development programmes. The «Legal groundwork for the tourism industry» course, as developed by
 the authors, views tourist activity as the object of legal regulation, covers the current issues of tourist activity
 legal regulation, identifies the operators of the tourist activity, describes the contracting system used in the
 tourism industry, provides for research into the major aspects of the legal groundwork for federal, regiona,
 and municipal programme development, the tourist market clusterization, etc. The course is designed as a
 core course for graduate students and as an advanced course of study for undergraduate students majoring
 in law- and/or service-and-tourism-related disciplines.