La educación en el impulso a una ciudadanía universal crítica

The next sub-chapter will present characteristics of the respondents to the phone interviews in three countries where the research was undertaken: United Kingdom, India and New Zealand. The sub-chapter will include the specification of the gender of the respondents (i.); their age and number of years they have been working within the hospitality and tourism field (ii.); their level of education (iii.); and the type of the agency they work for (iv.), which can be an independent enterprise, a chain or a franchise company.

i. Gender

From the obtained results, which are synthetically represented in Table 8. it can be noted that in the United Kingdom and in New Zealand more than 60% of the respondents were women, while in India women accounted for 43.4%.

Male Female Total

United Kingdom 71 (37.4%) 119 (62.6%) 190 (100%) India 154 (56.6%) 118 (43.4%) 272 (100%) New Zealand 65 (39.4%) 100 (60.6%) 165 (100%) Total 290 (46.3%) 337 (53.7%) 627 (100%)

Table 8. Gender distribution among phone interview respondents in the United Kingdom, India and New Zealand

The above-mentioned numbers are aligned with a common gender distribution in the hospitality and tourism field in the developed countries, where female employees prevail. For instance, the Department of Business Innovation and Skills of the Office of National Statistics (2009), suggested that in 2009 in the United Kingdom 82% of the workforce within the tourism industry were female.

ii. Age and years of work

Three main age groups were identified within this research (Figure 6.). The first group, includes the respondents that are younger than 32 years and represents the employees of the so-called generation Y, those who were born and raised with a different use of technologies and are believed to have different use of technologies for working purposes as well as for knowledge upgrade (Billings & Kowalski, 2004; Rapetti & Cantoni, 2010;

Selwyn, 2009). While the other two groups represent each circa fifteen years of professional life.

Figure 6. Age distribution among phone interview respondents in the United Kingdom, India and New Zealand (Total N = 627)

In the United Kingdom and in New Zealand three age groups are equally distributed, with about 88% of Indian travel agents that are younger than 47 years old, and as a result Indian respondents were younger than those in other two nations.

The years of work follow age distribution of the respondents and it is depicted in Table 9. In terms of the number of years working within the hospitality and tourism field, it will be interesting to mention that the number of travel agents who have worked for more than 15 years in the United Kingdom and in New Zealand represent 43.7% and 46.7% accordingly. Only 25.0% of the travel agents based in India have worked for the same period of time.

<5 years from 6 to 15 >15 years Total

United Kingdom 24 (12.6%) 83 (43.7%) 83 (43.7%) 190 (100%) India 62 (22.8%) 142 (52.2%) 68 (25.0%) 272 (100%) New Zealand 42 (25.4%) 46 (27.9%) 77 (46.7%) 165 (100%) Total 128 (20.4%) 271 (43.2%) 228 (36.4%) 627 (100%)

Table 9. Years of work distribution among phone interview respondents in the United Kingdom, India and New Zealand

29.5%

35.8% 34.7%

36.4%

51.5%

12.1%

26 %

35.2% 38.8%

< 32 years from 33 to 47 > 47 years

United Kingdom India New Zealand

iii. Level of education

In terms of the level of education among interviewed travel agents, one can observe significant differences in the three studied countries (Figure 7.).

Figure 7. Level of education among phone interview respondents in the United Kingdom, India and New Zealand (Total N = 627)

The biggest difference in the level of education is seen among travel agents based in the United Kingdom and in India. Indian agents are mostly very well educated, where 64.7%

of them possess a university degree, followed by 30.5% of the respondents in this country, who hold vocational school degrees, while less than 5% are working in the travel agency after graduating from a secondary school. This can be explained by the importance of the role that is given to the work in the travel agency sector in India, as well as by a higher entry level for these types of jobs, which is set by the employers in developing countries due to the scarcity of working positions.

While looking at British travel agents, it can be noted, that 42.6% of them possess a degree of the vocational school, followed by 36.8% with a secondary school diploma and 20.5% of the employees of the travel agency sector have graduated from a university. The majority of the travel agents who are based in New Zealand (41.2%) have been educated to satisfy vocational school standards, while 23% having completed high school. 35.8% of the travel agents based in New Zealand were educated to a University level.

70 (36.8%)

81 (42.6%)

39 (20.5%)

13 (4.8%)

83 (30.5%)

176 (64.7%)

38 (23%)

68 (41.2%)

59 (35.8%)

Secondary School Vocational School University

United Kingdom India New Zealand

iv. Agency type

As for the professional and employment factors involved, the distribution respondents according to the type of the agency they work for can be seen in Figure 8.

Figure 8. Agency type distribution among phone interview respondents in the United Kingdom, India and New Zealand (Total N = 627)

In the United Kingdom 77.9% of the travel agents were working in independent agencies and 22.1% in chains or franchising companies. In India those proportions are 72.1% and 27.9%; while in New Zealand 57.0% and 43.0% accordingly.

In order to possess larger information in the collected data set with the phone interviews and having a hypothesis that the employees of the chains and franchising might have similar internal training strategies and human resource development approaches, just one person per chain or franchising company was contacted. Furthermore, proportionally, the employees of the individual enterprises where contacted more in the United Kingdom and in India. Within the research process, the difficulty on accessing independent travel agents based in New Zealand by phone has emerged, and as a result, more employees working in chains or franchising companies were interviewed proportionally to the other two countries.

77.9%

22.1%

72.1%

27.9%

57.0%

43.0%

Independent agency Chain/ Franchising

United Kingdom India New Zealand