Reframing tourism education and scholarship: a 25-year reflection and future outlook

This viewpoint reflects on the evolution and future direction of tourism education, long positioned between vocational training and academic inquiry. A review of 25 years of scholarship in the Journal of Teaching in Travel and Tourism highlights shifts toward pedagogical innovation, technological integration, sustainability, and student development, alongside growing methodological rigor. Despite widespread adoption of generative AI, its use remains largely instrumental, revealing a “high adoption–low literacy” gap. The paper proposes that AI’s value lies in supporting human–AI co-creation, requiring redesigned curricula, multimodal assessment, and stronger integration of ethics, humanities, and interdisciplinary perspectives. It calls for developing graduates as “digital orchestrators” who combine technical fluency with empathy and ethical judgment. Finally, it advocates for more theory-driven, interdisciplinary, and methodologically diverse research to support evidence-informed transformation in tourism education.