Identifying Competencies for Leisure and Hospitality Curriculum in a Rural Region

This case study describes how competencies that are common across entities that operate in the leisure and hospitality industry in North Central Idaho were identified. The leisure and hospitality industry is crucial to the economy of many rural regions with scenic surroundings. Tourists’ satisfaction, however, depends on their experiences with frontline staff in the industry and service encounters are among the significant factors for customer satisfaction. Developing curriculum that leads to the proper training of frontline customer service representatives is important. A groupware process using workers in the leisure and hospitality sector was used to identify duties, tasks, general knowledge, skills, and attitudes for a guest relations agent. Issues and future trends were also identified. Results show half of the duties referenced essential interaction with customers, such as communicating to support customers and team, providing customer service, providing product/service/organization information, and providing customer assistance for local and regional activities. Trends and issues also point to the need to be prepared for factors such as outbreak of disease that may affect the operations in the sector.