School of Tourism, Beijing Union University

School of Tourism, Beijing Union University is the earliest tourism college in my country and the pioneer of tourism higher education in China. The college was founded in 1978 and was formerly known as Beijing Tourism College. It was officially named School of Tourism, Beijing Union University in 1985. The college has strong faculty, advanced teaching facilities, extensive international cooperation and superior location conditions.

The college adheres to the talent training concept of "extensive knowledge and elegant behavior, learning and traveling around the world" to cultivate high-quality applied tourism talents with broad knowledge, perfect personality, tourism sentiment and international vision, solid tourism professional knowledge and strong practical ability, strong sense of social responsibility, innovative entrepreneurial spirit and sustainable development ability. Over the past 40 years since its establishment, the college has cultivated a large number of outstanding tourism talents active in government departments, tourism enterprises and scientific research institutes, and has been well received by employers.

The college currently has 7 undergraduate majors, including tourism management, hotel management, exhibition economy and management, cooking and nutrition education, English, Japanese, and Spanish. Among them, tourism management and hotel management are both national first-class professional construction sites, and tourism management is also a national characteristic professional construction site and a key construction project of first-class majors in Beijing’s colleges and universities; exhibition economy and management is a provincial and ministerial first-class professional construction site; cooking and nutrition education is the only catering higher education major in Beijing. The overall level of the college’s professional construction ranks among the best in the country.

The college has a strong faculty, with a national excellent teaching team and a Beijing-level excellent teaching team. There are 132 full-time teachers, including more than 80 teachers with senior professional titles and more than 70 teachers with doctoral degrees. The college has a group of national well-known tourism experts, including members of the Teaching Steering Committee of the Tourism Management Major of the Ministry of Education, national 5A-level scenic spot evaluation experts, and national tourist resort evaluation experts. The college has also hired more than 40 well-known experts and industry executives from home and abroad as visiting professors and industry mentors. The college is the vice president unit of the Higher Education Branch of the China Tourism Association and the vice president unit of the Beijing Tourism Society.

The college has excellent conditions for running schools. It has a national-level tourism management experimental teaching demonstration center and a national-level off-campus practical education base for college students. It has the only national key laboratory for smart tourism in China. It has built a domestic leading and internationally advanced hotel and catering internship training base. It cooperated with China Youth Travel Service to build the first tourism education innovation laboratory in China, and jointly built the "Tourism Big Data Collaborative Innovation Center" with the former National Tourism Administration Information Center and IBM. The "Tourism Journal" founded by the college is the most authoritative tourism academic journal in China and one of the most influential tourism academic journals in the world.

The college attaches great importance to international exchanges and cooperation. It has established more than ten cooperative education projects with France, Ireland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, South Korea, Japan, Spain and other countries, providing students with various international exchange and learning opportunities. All students in school have the opportunity to apply for overseas exchange programs.

In the process of running schools for more than 40 years, the college has formed a distinctive feature of industry-education integration, relying on the tourism industry and serving the tourism industry. Looking to the future, the School of Tourism of Beijing Union University has set the goal of building a "domestic first-class and internationally renowned" tourism college as its goal, and will not forget its original intention and forge ahead!