On legal competence of bachelors and masters in tourism

The article presents the author''s perspective on the content of legal training as part of the undergraduateand graduate education in tourism-related disciplines and as implemented in the framework of the new(3+) generation of standards. The authors substantiate the expediency of the «Legal groundwork for thetourism industry» course development. The authors proceed from the premise that law-related courses havealways been generally considered to be the most challenging both for the faculty (as their teaching requires faculty members to be qualified instructors and legal practitioners actively engaged in research concerning legal regulation in the tourism industry) and the students, which brought a majority of HE institutions to consciously exclude the course from the curriculum or to replace it by other less law-specific courses. The authors ofthe article make a case of a complex approach to and consideration ofthe major issues linked to the legal groundwork for tourism activity, the development and implementation ofthe federal and regional tourism development programmes. The «Legalgroundworkfor the tourism industry» course, as developed by the authors, views tourist activity as the object of legal regulation, covers the current issues of tourist activity legal regulation, identifies the operators of the tourist activity, describes the contracting system used in the tourism industry, provides for research into the major aspects ofthe legal groundwork for federal, regiona, and municipal programme development, the tourist market clusterization, etc. The course is designed as a core course for graduate students and as an advanced course of study for undergraduate students majoring in law- and/or service-and-tourism-related disciplines.