Cultural awareness the the ability to recognise the subtleties and unique distinctions between your own and other cultures. Cultural competence is the ability to use this awareness, in combination with other knowledge, experience and interpersonal skills, to increase your understanding and appreciation of the cultural differences and similarities within and amongst groups.

Cultural Awareness and Competence 

Being both culturally aware and culturally competent is vitally important when working in the Tourism and Hospitality industries, where multicultural differences are often evident amongst both the international workforce and visiting tourists. In cross-cultural situations, a lack of cultural awareness can lead to poor decisions or actions which may result in undesired outcomes and isn’t good for business. Cultural awareness and competence allow employees to make insightful, well-considered decisions, communicate better with and show respect to colleagues and guests, acknowledge diversity, build rapport, avoid offence, attract and retain customers and ensure and improve visitor satisfaction and guest experience.

However, cultural awareness often isn’t part of the training provided by many employers or training centres, so, to bridge this gap and help develop Aotearoa’s service industries, a new training tool has been developed by the University of Otago, with the intention of raising the cultural awareness of tourism operators and their staff and providing useful resources to assist them with enhancing the visitor experience they provide for tourists from Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region.

Culture Ready Training Tool

The Culture Ready Training Tool was launched by the Centres of Asia-Pacific Excellence (CAPE) in Queenstown in July as part of a South Island programme rollout. The programme includes business workshops and seminars; resources for businesses – including operator and visitor video industry insights and PDFs covering a range of relevant topics; digital tours; curriculum support for teachers and educational programmes for students, in order to improve the awareness of all industry stakeholders and talent. The tool will also offer workshops.

The four main offerings of the CRTT are:

• Industry insights where users can learn about experiences and best practices from industry experts in serving visitors from different cultures to provide the best New Zealand tourism experience.
• Culture Insights and Resources which enable users to understand cultures of different visitor markets to offer a New Zealand tourism experience that is appreciated and leads to high visitor satisfaction.
• A Test Your Skills online multi-choice cultural knowledge quiz.

The CRTT was created and will be managed by professor Neil Carr, Dr Craig Lee, Dr Wiebke Finkler and Dr Ismail Shaheer from the University of Otago. “It has been very cleverly designed” claims CAPE management committee chair, deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Wellington, Blair McRae and Queenstown mayor Jim Boult concurs “Supporting our businesses, students and general public to develop the capability to engage with this market is an excellent way to ensure that we maximise the opportunity to come back stronger and better when international travel and exports do resume in full.”

The Culture Ready Training Tool can be found here.