Outcomes and Challenges of a Cooperative and Intercultural Learning Project: A Critical Analysis

Tourism per se is looking into the interactions and relationships with other cultures. Service quality perceptions vary from one culture to the other, cross-cultural hosts-tourists interaction shape experiences on both sides, and inform the development of emerging markets and products. Encountering another culture through social interactions can contribute largely to cross-cultural understanding and the development of adapted tourism provision. India and Belgium are historically not connected countries with each other. However, India attempts to increase the number of international visitors and Belgium aims at attracting more Indian visitors. In that context, two universities from Mumbai and Brussels decided to collaborate and develop a joint project aiming at fostering cross-cultural exchange between students in tourism management. The aim is to sensitise future tourism practitioners and to lower stereotypes of the other culture and developing adapted sustainable and responsible tourism products. The programme was initiated in 2014. It consists of a joint course focusing on the profiling of the partner universities as well as the development of specifically adapted itineraries and was based on direct virtual interactions between the students on a regular basis for a 4 months period. During that time, students interact through a simulation in which they play successively the roles of tourists and hosts. This chapter will look critically into the joint course experience of the last years. After highlighting the tourism context, the contents of the course and its implementation will be analysed. Learning outcomes and the change of perception of the other culture will be tackled.