Study trips and fieldwork in sloveniantourism studies: experience from Turstica

The education system in Slovenia is generally supportive of study trips or school excursions, which are organised already at primary and secondary school level to give the pupils and students an additional opportunity to learn about their homeland and neighbouring regions/countries. Study trips and fieldwork are an essential form of the study process in Slovenian higher education as well. This is especially true for the field of geography and its related disciplines. The review of higher education programmes of tourism studies (in the period before the COVID-19 pandemic) shows the importance of practical training and acquiring different competencies through study trips and fieldwork – either while learning about business tourism systems or tourist offer in the selected destinations. In paper, we focus on the experiences of conducting study trips and fieldwork at the University of Primorska, Faculty of Tourism Studies - Turistica, which stands as the only higher education institution in Slovenia with a degree in tourism at all three levels (BSc, MA and PhD). Study trips are an integral part of the curriculum, especially in the first cycle programmes, dominated by the cultural tourism study programme, where humanistic views and approaches in tourism take substantial part (e.g., anthropology, ethnology and geography). At Turistica, various study trips and fieldwork take place, ranging from one-day or two-day excursions in the local and regional environment or across Slovenia, to multi-day study tours abroad. The most complex example is a one-week study trip to Prague and Berlin, which is a study to which we pay special attention in the paper. It is a successful model of fieldwork, which will, with appropriate modifications, also be used as a model for shaping and arranging the future study trip of Turistica’s students to Bosnia and Herzegovina.