While there are over 180 Universities with tourism or hospitality programs in the U.S., most do not offer dedicated courses on tourism statistics and TSA. This appears to demonstrate a certain degree of structural disconnect between current tourism/hospitality curriculum and the majority of knowledge in the tourism statistics area contributed by national statistics offices and international organizations such as United Nations World Tourism Organization, World Bank, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

There appear to be two kinds of challenges for hospitality-tourism colleges to deliver tourism statistics/I-O/TSA courses, based on teaching experiences associated with a full-time elective course in Hospitality and Tourism schools. One is that only a small number of faculty members in hospitality/tourism colleges have formal training in institutional statistics/input-output, SNA or SAM. The other would be that few students are given the opportunities to learn about the importance of those topics. This results in lack of critical volume of demand for such courses. This paper and presentation will briefly present one exploratory method called a streaming video class, which is designed to disseminate knowledge and skills of tourism statistics to hospitality students who do not have prior background on rigorous economics, industry statistics and Tourism Satellite Accounts.

The full-semester fully-remote online course has been taught in Spring 2011 semester with 30 hospitality management students, the majority of which have no prior knowledge on economics, matrix computations and tourism statistics. The objective of the course is to conduct policy analysis quantitatively using I-O/SAM and use tourism statistics as a tool to design a better tourism policy with an aim to share the economic benefits to a host community. The outcome is measured quantitatively by weekly online quizzes, two exams and two simulation projects in which students are given 15 x 15 I/O and 46 x 46 SAM tables respectively to calculate impacts and income distribution effects over local residents and then present the analysis over policy choices. After obtaining usable knowledge on tourism statistics, I/O and SAM, students feel more prepared to understand Tourism Satellite Accounts and framework of sustainability.

Keywords: Tourism satellite accounts; Streaming video; Tourism statistics; Fully remote online course

Biography: Hara joined the faculty of Rosen College of Hospitality Management, University of Central Florida as an Associate Professor of Finance and Tourism Management. Before joining the Rosen College in 2005, he was teaching quantitative tourism industry analysis course, emphasizing Input-Output/Social Accounting Matrix (I-O/SAM) & Tourism Satellite Accounts (TSA) at School of Hotel Administration, Cornell University. Since 2010 he is serving as an Associate Dean of Finance and Administration. He is the single author of “Quantitative Tourism Industry Analysis - Introduction to I-O/SAM modeling and Tourism Satellite Accounts” by Elsevier (2008).

He received PhD, M.S in Regional Science, and MPS in Hotel Administration from Cornell University, NY, USA, MBA from University of Glamorgan, Wales, UK, and B.S in Law from Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan. He currently serves as an Advisory Committee Member for International Trend on Tourism Statistics, at Japan Tourism Agency, Ministry of Land Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism.