Working in tourism is serious business and far from a never ending vacation. However it offers great career potential, both as an entrepreneur and an employee.

Tourism and Travel offers great opportunities for career and is guaranteed to keep your job interesting and challenging. In tourism you work closely with people and need a high service orientation. Meeting many interesting people and giving them a great holiday experience can be very rewarding.

Since the independence of the Kyrgyz Republic, experts have noticed a huge potential in the tourism sector for this country. But while a lot has been developed, Kyrgyzstan is still behind expectations in this sector. There are many reasons for this, however one is that not enough people in Kyrgyzstan are trained in tourism as a business. This limits the number of qualified entrepreneurs and managers in this sector, developing new attractive tourism offers and marketing them effectively – both locally and abroad.

Tourism is a network and infrastructure business

Tourism is way more complex then it seems at first. Having a few good offers in not enough to make an area attractive for tourists. For a region to effectively earn money with tourism a complete network, infrastructure and cooperation needs to be established.

To give an example, let’s look at what tourist expect from an attractive ski resort and how one attractive service feeds the potential of other related services:

Good hotels and guesthouses will get more guests to the resort. An attractive skiing resort will make guests stay longer and return. An unattractive resort will do the opposite, no matter how good the hotel was.

Only guests that are staying over night will have dinner at the local restaurants or use other services offered around the ski resort.

Offers for children, like Ski-Kindergarten will attract more families. Child care services will allow the parents to use above mentioned restaurants in the evening.

Skiing and Snow boarding courses train beginners to enjoy winter sports. Only active skiers will rent skiing equipment.

Interesting events make tourist stay longer and also feed into that value chain.

To build the necessary infrastructure large investments are needed, which need to be professionally managed, e.g. lift infrastructure, tracks and access roads.

What this short and simplified example shows: Tourism is a complex business that requires successful players to have a deep understanding of different types of tourism, different tourist groups and their expectation, how to implement services and last but not least, how to market them effectively to attract customers.

The Cambridge Travel & Tourism course is effectively a “Business Studies” course, completely focused around Tourism and Hospitably. This makes is highly relevant for Kyrgyzstan and allows for this course to be less abstract, but work with specific applications all relating to the industry. Our course focuses on opportunities in Kyrgyzstan, but also looks at the situation abroad. Students learn by comparing and acquire the ability to understand specific situations and develop unique ideas and concepts.

Cambridge Course: Travel & Tourism

The course looks at four key concepts behind the industry:

• Global and growing
• Change and development
• Customer focus
• Sustainability and responsibility

The course analyzes how the market is structured, what different customer groups expect, how it is implemented and how effective marketing works.

New Cambridge Subjects for 2021

Starting with next school year (2021/2022) we will extend our Cambridge Program with the AS/A Level syllabus:

• Travel & Tourism (9395)

Based on feedback from parents, students and companies, we will also be introducing:

• Media Studies (9607)
• Design and Textiles (9631)

All these subjects are highly relevant in the changing Kyrgyz economy, offering a perfect background for the three largest growing sectors in the Kyrgyz Republic.

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