Travel and Tourism is the worlds largest industry as well as the worlds largest generator of jobs. Undoubtedly, tourism is a growing international industry that makes a significant contribution to employment. There is no widely accepted categorization of tourism employment. It creates mostly unskilled and semi-skilled jobs; employs young people with females dominating the workforce. Untrained, unmotivated, underpaid and unorganized labor force bears high labor turnover in the industry. Standard practice of Human Resource Management and Development is found lacking here.

Tourism or Hospitality business, a tertiary sector activity, has been given the status of the industry even prior to the liberalization of the economy in the 1990s. Tourism is an industry concerned with wooing people to a destination, transporting, accommodating, and entertaining them upon arrival and sending them back with memories of lingering experience (Manjula Chaudhary and DS Bhardwaj: 1997). It is a mega industry, which is instrumental in blending the sociocultural relations, a tool for economic development, a vital force for national integration and international peace and harmony, eradicator of poverty and social evils and a facilitator for human resource development. It is considered to be one of the easiest and most viable development options available to the developing countries. Tourism today is globally recognized as a major economic contributor and employment generator and it is regarded as a multifaceted economic asset (Selvam: 1989; KC Sharma: 1996).

The employment impact of capital investment in tourism is so strong that no developing country can afford to ignore the tourism industry. Tourism has a very positive capital-labor ratio. An investment of 1 mn rupees (at 1985-86 prices) would create 89 jobs in the hotel and restaurant industry, compared to 44.7 jobs in agriculture and 12.6 jobs in manufacturing industries. The average for the whole tourism industry is 47.5 jobs for an investment of 1 mn rupees (Khanna: 1999). This indicates the labor intensive nature of jobs created by tourism industry and related industries.

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