Take a step toward a career in Hospitality and Tourism.
This course lays a very solid foundation, encompassing 600 hours of intensive study to build knowledge, skills and networking in these industries.
Start your own business, enhance opportunities for advancement or seek new employment in hotels, restaurants, tour companies, travel agencies, resorts etc.
Modules
Note that each module in the Qualification - Certificate in Hospitality and Tourism is a short course in its own right, and may be studied separately.
Scope of Tourism
The tourism industry provides goods and services that are primarily for consumption by tourists, for example: transport services, accommodation, travel agencies, package tours, reservation systems, and tourist attractions such as theme parks, guided tours, and retail outlets.
Tourism is a diverse industry that often encompasses the skills and resources of other industries. Industries that may start out as primary or secondary producers can very easily become (at least in part) a tourist facility. For example:
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Farms might offer bed and breakfast facilities to supplement their income
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Factories conduct factory tours
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Shops that originally catered to local trade add new products to their shelves to cater for tourists
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Local craftspeople can cooperate to attract tourists to their workshops, galleries etc.
Whilst some businesses only cater for tourists (e.g. cruise ships and guided tours) others, such as restaurants and car rental firms, might be predominantly a tourism product in one locality but attract a different clientele (e.g. local and business people) in another locality.
The tourism industry provides a wide range of services; some essential, others optional. Accommodation, transport, food and toilet facilities are essential services. Sightseeing might not be essential, but without appropriate points of interest, the tourism value of a destination is certainly diminished.
Scope of Hospitality
Hospitality can encompass providing accommodation, food services (catering, restaurants), managing events, or any other services geared to make like comfortable and enjoyable for the client.
Scope of Accommodation
Shelter is not a basic human invention; it is something which all humans seek instinctively, as do all animals, in a world which is very seldom attuned exactly to an individual's physiological and social needs.
The concept of what a building needs to be is more than just a shelter. It is, functionally, what we expect it to be. The following list makes an attempt to include all the functional requirements which a building is expected to fulfill:
1. Provision for the most immediate needs of human metabolism.
- Clean air for breathing.
- Clean water for drinking, food preparation, washing, and flushing of wastes.
- In some buildings, facilities for preparation and food consumption.
- Removal and recycling of wastes, including excrement, wash food wastes and rubbish.
2. Creation of the necessary conditions for human thermal comfort:
- Control of the mean radiant temperature.
- Control of the air temperature.
- Control of the thermal characteristics of surfaces which are contacted directly by the human body.
- Control of humidity and air circulation.
- Exclusion of water from inhabited space.
3. Creation of the necessary conditions for sensory comfort, efficiency and privacy.
- Optimum visual conditions
- Visual privacy
- Optimum hearing levels
- Acoustic privacy
4. Control of the exit and entry of living creatures.
5. Distribution of concentrated energy to convenient points for use in powering various tools and appliances.
6. Provision of certain channels of connection and communication with the outside world - windows, telephones, mailboxes, etc.
7. Facilitation of bodily comfort, safety and productive activity through the provision of useful surfaces, floors, walls, stairs, shelves, counter tops, benches, etc.
8. Provision of static support for the weights of all people, belongings, equipment, etc., and of sufficient structural resistance to adverse weather conditions.
9. Furnishing of reasonable protection to its occupants, its contents and itself against fire damage.
10. A building must be built without excessive expense or difficulty.
11. A building must be capable of being operated, maintained and changed in a useful economical manner.
ACS Learning Facilities
ACS follows the old fashioned idea that the student comes first. Our staff are told to treat every student as an individual and respond promptly to their enquiries; and the facilities we have developed and continue to develop, are all focused on that goal. Facilities include:
- Offices in two time zones (UK and Australia) –which means an international team of academics are responding to students 5 days a week and 16 hours a day.
- An online student room with unique resources that are only available to students studying our courses, including online library.
- Bookshop offering quality downloadable e books
- A data base of 20 million words of unique information written by our staff over 3 decades that can be drawn upon if needed by academics for use in supporting our students.
- Systems that ensure assignments are tracked, marked and returned to students, fast -commonly within a round 1 week & rarely more than 2 weeks (note: many other colleges take longer).
- The school is active in social networking and encourages students to connect with us and each other.
- No automated handling of student phone enquiries. When you call you get a real person; or leave a message and a real person will call you back within a day, but more commonly within an hour or two.
- No additional charges for extra tutor support over the phone or email.
- Free careers advice for graduates –It is our policy to provide support and advice to our students even after they graduate. If a graduate needs help with getting a CV together, or advice on setting up a business or looking for work; they only need ask.
- The quality of academic staff is higher than many other colleges.
How our Courses Differ
- Courses are continually improved –we invite feedback from all graduates and change courses immediately the need is detected.
- Courses are relevant to the whole world –we try hard to teach make the learning transferable to any region or country because the world is increasingly a global economy
- Courses written by our staff, teach different skills to standard courses; giving a unique mix of skills and knowledge to provide a career advantage. Do you want an accredited certificate and the same skills as 100 other job applicants; or one of our courses with skills that no other applicants have?
- Certificates and diplomas are longer. They teach you more, and our qualifications have built a reputation amongst academics and industry as being a very high standard for this reason.
- We are focused on helping you learn in a way that improves your capacity to understand your discipline, apply knowledge, and continue learning and developing your capabilities beyond your course.
These things cannot be always said of other colleges.
Career Opportunities
As people have become increasingly affluent around the world, more people travel, and more go to restaurants. There may at times be a lull in growth; but overall, hospitality and tourism are industries that will continue to grow as developing countries continue to prosper, and developed countries continue to grow.
Study alone can never guarantee career success; but a good education is an important starting point. When you know more, you have an understanding of things; which in turn increases the speed with which you can adapt to change and seize on new opportunities.
Success in a career depends upon many things. A course like this is an excellent starting point because it provides a foundation for continued learning, and the means of understanding and dealing with issues you encounter in the workplace.
When you have completed an ACS course, you will have not only learned about the subject, but you will have been prompted to start networking with experts in the discipline and shown how to approach problems that confront you in this field.
This and every other industry in today's world is developing in unforeseen ways; and while that is unsettling for anyone who wants to be guaranteed a particular job at the end of a particular course; for others, this rapidly changing career environment is offering new and exciting opportunities almost every month.
If you want to do the best that you can in this industry, you need to recognise that the opportunities that confront you at the end of a course, are probably different to anything that has even been thought of when you commence a course.
