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This chapter analyzes the importance and performance of values in tourism higher education and business as seen by the alumni of the European Master in Tourism Management. The students were exposed to the values-based education framework proposed by the Tourism Educational Future Initiative. This chapter empirically tests the relevance of its model for an ideal and real industry, and for the corresponding world of tourism education. Using importance performance analysis, results identify gaps between the importance and performance in the values. The findings have implications for the future development and implementation of experimental values-based education.

This chapter explains the background of the book and begins with an introduction of Jafar Jafari’s tremendous contribution to tourism knowledge creation and education. This is followed by a report on the content analysis of 573 tourism education related articles published in the past 10 years. Results indicated the need for philosophical discussion about the nature of tourism education and the popularity of teaching and learning approaches as a research topic. The two main sections of this book, namely philosophical issues in tourism education and experiential/active learning in tourism education, fit into these two identified issues. A synopsis of each chapter is provided next; and future directions for tourism education research are suggested.