It’s been said that travel never stands still, yet our official training qualifications somehow managed to take a ten-year nap. The Australian Travel Careers Council (ATCC) has finally decided enough is enough, dragging the Certificate III in Travel (SIT30222) out of its slumber and into the harsh light of 2025.
This is no light dust-off. It’s a full-scale renovation, led by ATCC’s freshly minted Travel Industry Strategic and Employability Skills Identification Taskforce, a name so long you’ll need a boarding pass to get through it. Thankfully, they’ve shortened it to the Travel Skills Taskforce, proving at least someone in the room has a sense of mercy.
A qualification frozen in time
The qualification was developed when smartphones were novelties, school traineeships barely existed, and “digital literacy” meant knowing how to print a boarding pass. Unsurprisingly, the course is now about as current as a Pan Am timetable.
ATCC chief executive Rick Myatt isn’t mincing his words.
“This action (to reform) is essential as the Cert III in Travel qualification was developed over a decade ago, and the industry has evolved significantly since then,” he said, adding that the refresh is being steered by ATCC directors and seasoned practitioners who know what today’s travel desks actually look like.
And what do they look like? Less paper, more pixels. Less “can I put you on hold?” and more “your app should be working now”.
The plan: fold travel into tourism
The ATCC’s grand design is to tuck travel units neatly into the broader Certificate III in Tourism, making them compulsory electives for anyone who actually wants to sell travel for a living. It’s a clever trick: by sheltering under the tourism umbrella, the travel pathway gets access to national funding, a perk that Cert III in Travel has long been denied.
Myatt is banking on this to fix one glaring absurdity: the entire state of New South Wales currently boasts just seven school-based travel traineeships. Seven. That’s fewer than most suburban football teams field on a Saturday.
“Their demography, digital literacy, technical savviness, ethical sensitivity, and fresh ideas are valuable assets for our industry’s future,” Myatt said of the trainees, stressing that they’re not just warm bodies but exactly the kind of new blood the industry needs.
Why this matters
A shortage of VET providers has left travel training patchy at best, with many colleges unwilling to offer an inadequately funded course. By rolling travel into tourism, ATCC hopes to end the stalemate and give the industry a steady supply of trained recruits.
ATCC advisory board director Barry Mayo sees the reform as overdue and essential.
“This initiative to review travel-related qualifications should assist with upgrading the preparation of new entrants into the industry tutoring them on techniques to approach ongoing issues and challenges, while significantly increasing traineeship opportunities, ideally through integration of the travel entry pathway to a broadly funded Certificate III in Tourism.”
Translation: the old Cert III left new starters floundering. This overhaul should finally prepare them for the real world.
A future-ready workforce
It’s not just about fixing the present. Travel has morphed into an industry where sustainability, crisis management, and customer data protection are as important as knowing whether a hotel has free Wi-Fi. The revamped qualification aims to prepare students for that reality, not the one their parents graduated into.
If ATCC succeeds, the days of treating travel training like a poor cousin of tourism could finally be behind us. Instead, the industry might get the steady pipeline of sharp, tech-savvy, ethically grounded professionals it has sought.
This is more than a box-ticking exercise for a sector that lives or dies on service quality. It’s a survival strategy and, with any luck, a passport to a brighter, better-trained future.
By Prae Lee
