International Tourism, Hospitality and Events BSc (Hons) - Completion Award
2 Years full-time or 3 years sandwich | September Start

The Management Enquiry module is a student-led individual project that enables you to undertake a significant piece of assessed work commensurate with a capstone module. The module aims to provide you with an opportunity to demonstrate an authentic engagement with managers and/or professionals in your discipline, and to integrate the knowledge you have developed during your programme to explore the theory in practice. The learning on this module is experiential and problem based, where the focus is upon you discovering, probing and questioning key practice-based issues. Through the module you will be offered the opportunity to develop and enhance key transferable employability skills including; time management, project management, communication (written, aural and verbal), negotiation, persuasion and influence, discovery, initiative, problem-solving and analysis.

The module has five thematic areas; explore, review, engage, reflect and connect. These form the key elements of the assessed submission.

Part A (35%, 3,500 Words)
• Explore: Interviewing a manager and/or professional in your discipline. In this interview you will either explore a key issue which you feel the discipline is facing or, alternatively, explore with the manager or professional the key issues that they feel they are facing in practice. It is expected that you will apply appropriate interview methods and provide evidence of the interview within the submitted enquiry report (e.g. within the appendices).
• Review: Critically examining the appropriate literature to support the exploration, displaying an ability to critically assess and appraise the knowledge of your discipline related to a specific key issue arising from your exploration.

Part B (65%, 6,500 Words)
• Engage: Displaying an authentic engagement with the discipline problem/issue identified in Part A, by collecting/generating and analysing further live data (beyond the initial interview) regarding the discipline problem/issue. This live data may be primary data (e.g. further interviews with, or questionnaire to, managers and/or professionals in practice) or secondary data (e.g. industry data). Application of appropriate, ethically-considered, research methods and appropriate qualitative or quantitative data analysis.
• Reflect and Connect: Demonstrating an ability to critically evaluate and reflect on the issues arising from the Management Enquiry. Demonstrating how you have connected and fed-back to the participants of the Enquiry (usually the manager and/or participants) your key findings to provide clear prioritised, well-justified, practical and actionable recommendations for change/enhancement/improvement to existing practice to show how the recommendations would potentially affect workplace professional decision making.

The dissertation module aims to equip you with the necessary intellectual and practical skills for undertaking an individual student-led, ethical investigation into an applied business (or the named degree) problem or issue. In addition, the dissertation aims to equip you with key transferable, employability skills, including: time management, project management, communication (written and verbal), negotiation, persuasion and influence, discovery, initiative, creativity and innovation in problem-solving, analysis.

The module is student-led but you are supported by, initially, weekly lectures and seminar-workshops which provide an introduction to undertaking Business-Management research followed by one-to-one or small-group supervision meetings.
The lectures and seminar-workshops will cover the following topics:
1. Developing a research aim/question (focusing and scoping the research)
2. Developing a literature review
3. Writing a research proposal
4. Researching ethically
5. Quantitative research techniques
6. Qualitative research techniques
7. Quantitative analysis techniques
8. Qualitative analysis techniques

Upon completion of the module you will be able to:
1. Conduct independent and ethical academic research involving the application and critical evaluation of appropriate theories and models,
2. Engage critically with relevant literature to establish a framework in which to analyse and synthesise the results of your primary or secondary research
3. Generate / collect relevant primary or secondary data using an appropriate and justified method
4. Analyse your data using an appropriate and justified method of analysis
5. Recognise the ethical implications of your work
6. Critically evaluate the source of your data and the method you adopted

The module aims to provide you with an opportunity to integrate the knowledge acquired during the programme and apply this to a consultancy project for a real organisation. This consultancy project provides a vehicle for participants to develop and demonstrate key employability skills, to relate theory to practice, and to undertake a significant piece of assessed work commensurate with a capstone module.

You will work on behalf of an external organisation, which has identified a business problem or question, requiring a solution, working in small group of typically 4 individuals (you will select their own team members), participating in group and individual activities. The host organisation will provide a project briefing, and review; students will be supported by appropriate academic input and guidance from Newcastle Business School in the form of a mentor and via the Business Clinic.

In this module you will learn about the context of responsible strategic thinking, how to identify and explore sustainable business opportunities as a source of competitive advantage. You will gain an appreciation of the overarching principles of setting and executing a responsible and sustainable organisational strategy. Within the setting of these strategic objectives, you will understand how the associated responsible decision making will impact on both internal and external stakeholders. Your learning will span across private and public sector organisations, MNEs and SMEs and how each of different organisations and industries interact with the responsible and sustainable business opportunities and challenges.

This module explores the uncertain futures of tourism by encouraging in-depth discussion and critique of key tourist questions and challenges facing communities, industry and governments. Tourism can only exist in the long term if it is managed responsibly. And yet the industry faces short demands for profits in a dynamic and challenging environment, which creates negative impacts that compromises its very own future. The module seeks to develop both theoretical and practical knowledge on how best to develop tourism potential without endangering the surrounding infrastructure and environment.

The module will cover four distinctive areas of study.

Firstly, sustainable tourism as the objective of both tourism industry and destinations. You will gain a critical appreciation of theoretical approaches to sustainability and will critically discuss the implementation of sustainable tourism policies and practices.

Secondly, the impacts of climate change and other risk factors in tourism. Climate change is arguably the single most important global environmental issue facing the tourism sector. Tourism both contributes to, and will be notably affected by, climate change.

Thirdly, transport, human mobility and globalisation. These issues are considered in terms of social, physical, virtual, cultural and historical aspects of the movement of people, artefacts, goods and ideas. Increased restrictions to global mobility will be also considered.

Finally, the challenges of an ageing population for tourism. Some of the many emerging consequences of economically successful societies and its changing demographics will be unpacked as new strategies are needed for dealing with the modern propensity to travel.

The module aims to provide you with an overview of the international hospitality industry and its management and strategic and operational practices which accompany it. The module provides knowledge of both historical and current factors which have shaped the industry and provides you with the skills to evaluate changes taking place in key markets and be able to consider the implications of these for hospitality providers.

You will learn about the following topics:
• The hotel sector – diversity, product appraisal
• An evaluation of global hospitality demand and the industry’s response to changes in consumer demand
• Hospitality marketing and brand management
• Hospitality operations, theory and practice in departments and functions
• International hospitality growth strategies
• Hospitality customer service management, loyalty and quality.
• The experience economy, servicescape and co-construction of experience, experiencescape and eventscape
• International hospitality human resource management
• Sustainability

Innovation is a key concept in business and entrepreneurial studies, and for managers within the tourism, hospitality and events industry, it is important to understand the relationship between tourism and innovation within the context of global economic, social, environmental and consumer challenges.

In this module you will gain a comprehensive understanding of the nature and practice of innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship within tourism, hospitality and events (THE). You will understand the relationship between tourism and innovation and be provided with an overview of relevant innovation theories and related literature so you can understand the significance of innovation to the contemporary global tourism, hospitality and events industry. You will learn about consumer behaviour in THE consumption, the importance of experience economy and co-creation of the tourist experience and explore changing contexts in relation to the contemporary consumer; leading to more specialised, sophisticated, technologically enabled products.

You will progress, exploring the means by which categories of THE innovation are being developed; product, service, technical, process innovation, managerial/management, marketing, and institutional innovation. You will examine the benefits of innovation and creative product development for organisations within the THE and evaluate the role of the entrepreneur within this process.

The module will also reflect on practice and developments in small and medium enterprises, making comparison with operations and practice in larger organisations from an innovative and creative perspective, exploring the entrepreneurial aspects of both. Key themes which you will explore:
The theories and models that guide the development of business, product and service innovation for tourism, hospitality and events sector,
The role and nature of competition, knowledge exchange and creativity,
The creative use of entrepreneurship, social innovation and sustainable practice,
The role of tourism in responding to developmental opportunities created by technology, societal change and economic necessity,

You will explore the development and operation of the following tourism, hospitality & event products;
• place/ regional development and destination marketing,
• rural/ green & food tourism,
• event and festival sustainability,
• creative and heritage attractions,
• servicescape/ eventscape and theming,
• technology innovation in restaurants and hospitality, and
• new & enhanced product offerings within accommodation sector such as integrated resorts & casino operations, luxury hotels, eco accommodation & cruise ship operations.
You will evaluate these from a management, marketing, strategic and sustainable practice perspective and will draw on the concepts of entrepreneurial activity. This will give you skills and knowledge necessary to develop a career in tourism, events and hospitality and also skills which are transferable to other industries.

Your learning will be supported by a wide range of learning material drawn from academic literature, regional, national and international case studies.