Tourism belongs to a higher level of demand in people’s lives.

It only appears when

others fundamental needs such as breathing, eating, drinking, sleeping are met. When the
material life is fulfilled, people will think more about doing things that makes them happy
and relax so tourism become more and more important and even can not separated in our
daily lives. Moreover, tourism planner and resource manager will be the one directly design
tour for tourists. To be able to become a person like that, we must have a wide range of
knowledge from different industries and clearly understand each kind of customers’ taste.
This is the reason why this course attracted me and made me want to study as soon as
possible. Besides, because I heard many compliments from my friends that the teacher:
Earney Lasten is really funny and his lessons are really easy to understand so I decided to
enroll this course.
At first, I am not really interested in and focused on the theory because in my opinion,
tourism and hospitality is the more you practice, the better you are. But after learning a first
few weeks, I realized that I was wrong. I remembered my teacher said that: “ If you do not
learn the theory, how do you know what to do when you face the reality”. At that time, I was
taught about how to build a better understanding in guests, travelers and tourists so I decided
to apply it into reality. As I am working part-time for a tea house in district three, my boss
was wondering how to increase sales and the number of regular customers. I offered her to
conduct a survey at our store to collect data from the customers such as their demographic,
income, demands/expectations, reason of choosing our tea house. Doing this in order to
understand our regular customers will be at which age and gender as well as their tastes. The
result we had after one month researching the statistics, we found out that our guests are
mainly female from 18 to 40. They like to take pictures and usually stay for long hours. Next,
we decided to focus on redecorating such as buying beautiful cups and pots, decorative paper
for walls and build a new image for the tea house. As a result, after redecorating everything,
we received many compliments for the new decoration and the sales increase significantly in
the next months. Thanks to this experience, I realized how important it is to understand
clearly the theory so that you can apply it when necessary.
Because this is only my second semester at RMIT so honestly, I am not really used to
working in a group and I had a bad experience in group working last semester. But the group
I am working with in this course is totally different. They are the greatest teammates I have
ever had. They are well-organised, work effectively, funny and always try to support each
other. We are always operating as a group. Sometimes there might be argue when we discuss
the idea, outline for the assignment but fortunately, none of us are bossy and disrespectful.
Because we understand and respect the contribution of each member to the assignment, we
always try to find out the solution that suits all of us best. About myself, I personally think
that I need to learn more about how to express my thoughts and ideas clearer, more specific
so that my teammates can easily understand it. In order to help others to maximize their
contribution, the best way is to know which one is their strength and weakness, then we task
them with the suitable job. For example, if my friend good at researching, she will work
mostly on finding information, articles to support our idea. After having many teamwork this
semester, I think I will good at collect and classify the ideas, information that will be used in
the assignment and my weakness is my writing is not as good as others members that I need
to overcome it. If there is something that our group need to change is just we need to have
more meetings in order to coordinate more effectively.
In conclusion, thanks to this course, I have learnt many useful information and gain
knowledge in tourism industry. It not only helps me to solve reality problems but also teach
me how to work in a team effectively.