Perceptions and attitudes of undergraduate tourism students towards working in the tourism industry in Turkey

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to develop a multi-dimensional and multi-item attitude scale for measuring undergraduate tourism students' attitudes towards working in the tourism industry, and to investigate the general attitudes of undergraduate tourism students using the new measure. This paper describes the scale-development process and presents the results of the testing of the new scale among a sample of four-year tourism and hotel management school students in Turkey. Overall, unfavourable or negative evaluations towards different dimensions of working in the tourism industry are reported. Implications for the travel industry, the public sector and tourism and hotel management schools are also discussed. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.