International Study tours to India: Tour Operators and Tour Leaders perspectives

Abstract

In today's age of globalization, international students’ mobility is on the rise and projected to reach around 8 million annually by the year 2025 (OECD, 2012). One of the lesser known reasons for international students mobility is the International Study tour, which is a short duration, unique mode of students’ travel organized by a parent educational institution/association to one or more foreign destinations. Such tours incorporate touristic elements and are also a limited-duration travel like tourism and yet one of the most neglected area in tourism research. In this paper the perception of two very important stakeholders was taken into account; that of the tour operators and the tour leaders. The specific objective was to understand existing marketing approaches and other related operational aspects of such tours in the Indian context. These inputs will add to the body of knowledge about international study tours from the tourism perspective and will also have tourism policy planning implications. Research Approach:The study is mostly qualitative in nature. Two sets of Questionnaires were prepared and the responses were examined for meaningful new insights and knowledge to supplement already existing literature on international study tours. For open-ended questions, thematic content analysis with an inductive latent approach was adopted. Narrative analysis was another method found suitable for this paper. A clearly specified list of problems and challenges that have emerged from this study presents a suitable basis for designing the right responses/solutions to address them.