Hospitality and tourism management personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

I started keeping notes on places to visit near my home town because my cousins were always asking what there was to do on a wet Saturday. The notes turned into a simple website with about thirty entries: canal walks, a working watermill, the free museum above the library, bus routes and rough costs. Making it taught me that a destination is not just an attraction but everything around it, including whether the café is open on a Monday and whether anyone can find the entrance. That is roughly what drew me towards hospitality and tourism management rather than, say, geography alone. I am interested in the decisions behind the visitor experience: how a hotel prices rooms in a quiet February, why a heritage site invests in a decent tea room, how a town persuades people to stay overnight instead of passing through. My Business A-level has given me the language for some of this, particularly on segmentation and capacity, and Geography has made me cautious about assuming tourism is automatically good for a place. I read the tourism section of the local council's economic plan last year and was struck by how much depended on things outside anyone's control, like a single mainline train service. I want to study the subject properly, including the operational side, so that I understand costs and staffing as well as marketing. In the longer term I would like to work in destination or visitor attraction management, ideally somewhere that is not already obvious on a map.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

I am studying Business, Geography and English Language at A-level. Business has been the most directly useful: a coursework task on a local independent hotel made me work through occupancy figures and break-even, and I learned that a business can look busy and still be struggling because of when the bookings fall. Geography has covered regeneration and place-marketing, and my coursework involved surveying a high street about footfall and reasons for visiting. Designing the questionnaire was harder than I expected, because early versions led people towards the answers I wanted, and I had to redraft it twice before my teacher was satisfied it was neutral. English Language has improved how I write for different audiences, which I used when I rewrote the descriptions on my walks website to be shorter and less flowery. Alongside lessons I completed an online introduction to sustainable tourism, which was where I first properly understood seasonality and leakage, the idea that money spent by visitors can leave the local economy quickly. I am also working through a book on service operations borrowed from the college library; the section on queuing and perceived waiting time changed how I look at the café where I work. My study habits are steady rather than dramatic: I plan the week on a Sunday, and I have learned to start coursework drafts early because my best improvements come from redrafting.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

For the past fourteen months I have worked weekends in the café at a garden centre, mainly on the till and the coffee machine, with some clearing and restocking. Saturday mornings are our busiest period and I have become good at judging when to start a second batch of scones and when to warn the kitchen that a coach party has arrived. I have also handled complaints, usually about waiting times, and found that explaining honestly how long something will take defuses most of them. In the summer I was asked to help train a new starter on the till, which meant slowing down and explaining the order of tasks rather than just doing them myself. At college I volunteered as a guide for two open evenings. Another student and I were given the same tour route and split it so that one of us led while the other answered questions at the back, which worked better than both of us talking. We timed the route beforehand and cut out one corridor because it made the tour run long. Outside this I play netball for a local club, where I take a turn organising lifts to away fixtures, and I look after my younger brother after school two days a week. Keeping the walks website updated is still a hobby: I check opening times each season, and the most popular page is a list of places with step-free access, which I only added after a reader emailed to ask.

This example has 4,243 characters across the three answers. Use it for ideas and structure. Your own UCAS answers must fit within 4,000 characters in total, including spaces.

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