“Agent for Local Tourist development”
The course meets the needs to reveal the regional resources of the European countries, from a tourist viewpoint, through the setting up of a professional able to enhance them, in order to increase the tourist flows toward his/her regions. Through an e-learning course, in English, of tourist and specific suited techniques, it has been thought to train an expert called “Agent for Local Tourist development” (acronym ALT).
From the analysis of the needs, it is obvious that the tourist operators present in some regions work mainly in outgoing while the wealth of the territory, its history, and traditions are undervalued and not commercialized enough to allow a constant incoming. This situation, from this point of view, doesn't contribute to support the economy of the countries that, though full of environmental resources, but with poor infrastructures, structures and adequate professionalism, would require investment to favour tourist development and the more general socioeconomic development.
The objectives of the course are suitable in the training of an operator, " Agent for Local Tourist development " (ALT) able to:
improve local resources from a tourist viewpoint;
organize and spread tourist products;
create intermediary incoming services;
contribute to the formation of packages.
The pedagogic and methodological approach underlying the project considers such development as a factor of growth of the communities and, therefore, the creation of local operators as a privileged strategy to favour such development.
The development of a community constitutes, therefore, the theoretical and methodological frame of the course whose more general philosophy is to promote active citizenship by the building up and the exploitation of local resources.
The didactic approach
wants to favour, through e-learning, the active involvement of the trainees,
with respect of the individual times of learning, of the personal ability of
formative self evaluation indicated by the European documentation, of the
possibility of using modular flexible runs, of the possibility of periodical
meetings with tutors. They will have the tasks of testing, reinforcement and
assistance to the trainees.
The target of the course are adults in possession of :
1 knowledge of English at intermediate level (Level 4);
2 abilities of using the Internet (Level 3);
3 basics knowledge of economics (Level 1);
4 knowledge of the country's geography (Level 3);
5 basic factual knowledge of tourism (Level 2);
(*) Levels are related to European Qualifications Framework (PDF-file)
It is an advantage to work or study in the tourist sector having both supervision and some autonomy.
The Agent for Local Tourism Development (ALT):
as a freelance, creates new enjoyable and cheaper alternatives of tourist products in order to satisfy the needs of customers that want to complete their cultural run with the direct knowledge of less known countries;
as an intermediary, suggests and sells packages realized by tour operators;
Therefore, the Agent for Local Tourism Development:
must have a good knowledge of the resources of the territory in environmental, natural, historical, archaeological, structural, infrastructural and economic terms.
communicates correctly in English in order to facilitate, if the need arises, to carry out all the activities regarding the functions of reception, information, setups, transfer, services organization, promotion of present events on his/her territory, bookings, alternative and personalized routes.
Level of autonomy
The ALT is able to create an enterprise for autonomous work with given funds, either as a consultant of a Tour Operator (TO)/Travel Agency (TA), or as an employee qualified in the specific tasks assigned to him, enjoying sufficient autonomy since he has to answer only, in hierarchical terms, to his manager.