Soft Skill Competency Development to Enhance Competitiveness of Thai Incentive Travel Industry

Abstract

  Abstract

       Incentive travel has been recognized as a vitally important sector of Thailand’s tourism and hospitality industry due to its demand for luxurious and additional recreational activities. With such recognition, Thailand needs to improve the productivity and quality of human capital to generate higher sales per employee compared to those of neighboring countries in the Asia-Pacific region. To remain competitive in the long run, the Thai incentive travel businesses are now applying the competency-based approach as part of the operations plan in training and developing their personnel. In this study, the researcher adapted the Language of Work or LOW model and work tasks by positions to collect interview data from the key stakeholders and the industrial experts. The finding revealed that the stakeholders or incentive travel operation planners rely on their soft skill competencies rather than technical skill competencies to perform their jobs up to the expected level. The results of the study pointed to the focus of competency-based training and development, particularly on soft skill competencies for high performance of personnel in incentive tourism.

 Keywords: Incentive travel, training and development, soft skill competency, Language of  Work--LOW model, Thai tourism