Tourism and hospitality training and education have been offered by institutions within the Caribbean since as early as the 1950s, and have become solidified within the academy due to the region becoming the most tourism-dependent in the world. Given the thriving nature of the tourism industry within the Caribbean, there has been an increase in demand for tourism and hospitality positions to be filled; realization of this demand has seen an increase in the number of institutions which provide tourism and hospitality education within the Caribbean.

The Western tourist in the Caribbean is unavoidably in a position of in-authenticity and naïve but guilty spectatorship—always already on the outside; always ready with a camera—to take /capture/shoot static moments of picturesque in-significance. “Here’s one of me in front of the hotel…on the beach…outside the Independence Monument…” The relation of the ‘tourist’ to the place visited is by its very nature one of impermanence, of temporary, fleeting and superficial pleasure—of escape from the ‘real world’.