Chapter 15: Cultural Intelligence as an Important Skillset for Boosting Tourism

Tourism industry is one of the largest service industries present universally, and face-to-face interaction is one of its most important characteristics. Employees in a variety of sectors of this industry, including hotels, travel agencies, restaurants, theme parks, etc., have direct contact with clients from a variety of the world is divided into regions with various civilizations. The cultural environment in which interactions between service providers and clients take place complicates the sector. For this reason, those working in the tourism sector should adapt to the many cultures they encounter on a daily basis. Cultural intelligence is one of the key issues that have come up in the discussion of tolerance in multicultural settings. A measure of cultural intelligence can be used to assess a person's capacity for acclimating to a novel cultural setting. In order to address the impact of individual variations on the development of intercultural communications, Earley (2002) introduced the idea of cultural intelligence. One's capacity to comprehend and adjust to various cultures increases with their level of cultural intelligence. The objective of this book chapter is to explore the concept of culture intelligence and its importance in tourism industry. This concept is still in its infancy and has not been explored much. The book chapter will be based on secondary data.