Tour Leadership and Management

Shailja Sharma, BBA (Management), MBA (Marketing), MTM, PhD, UGC (NET and JRF), is currently working as an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Tourism and Travel Management (IITTM), an autonomous body under the Ministry of Tourism, Government of India. She has been the chairperson for the BBA (Tourism and Travel) programme for the Noida campus during 2015-2018 besides handling various other administrative assignments and portfolios since 2007.

She has a total of 15 years of experience with 13 years of experience in teaching and training in tourism and 2 years of corporate experience. She has extensively taught more than 3,000 students at IITTM, Delhi, and IITTM, Noida, in various programmes such as Postgraduate Diploma in Management (Tourism and Leisure), MBA (Tourism and Travel) and BBA (Tourism and Travel) besides being invited to deliver lectures in different universities of India. Her teaching interests include tourism concepts and practices, tour leadership management, tour guiding, marketing in tourism and human resource management in tourism. She has also been instrumental in introducing activity-oriented teaching pedagogy at IITTM, Noida.

She has trained over 1,500 tour guides and tour leaders. She is a qualified trainer of the World Federation of Tourist Guide Association from London. She has designed and delivered various tour leadership programmes for travel corporates along with various tour guiding and leadership programmes for various state governments. Besides these, she has designed and delivered more than 35 training programmes for a range of stakeholders in the tourism industry, which include tourist information officers, senior government officials posted in state
tourism departments, cab drivers, travel agents, army personnel and so on. She has also been actively involved in community projects such as the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan.

She has a PhD in tour guiding and has published research papers in various reputed journals. She has also been associated with research projects with the Ministry of Tourism, Government of India, and Indian Council of Social Science Research. She has travelled extensively across 5 continents to 22 countries to gain an international experience and earn an insight into tourism management and its latest practices. In 2018, her co-authored title Tour Leadership and Management was published by SAGE, India. In 2014, she also co-authored the title A Textbook of Travel and Tourism for Class IX based on the guidelines given by National Vocational Education Qualification Framework and the syllabi prescribed by CBSE. She has also been actively involved in the making of 'Fundamental Glossary for Tourism' by the Commission of Scientific & Technical Terminology, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India. Nimit Chowdhary, BE (Mech.), MBA, PhD, is a full professor and heads the Department of Tourism, Hotel, Hospitality and Heritage Studies of Jamia Millia Islamia. He was earlier with the Indian Institute of Tourism and Travel Management. He has more than 24 years of teaching and research experience. He has also taught as a full professor at Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, Mexico (2001); Shaoxing University, China (2005); and Mizoram University (2007). He has also taught as a visitor at the University of Girona, Spain; University of Gotland, Sweden; Global Entrepreneurship Acad., Slovenia; Indian Institute of Management, Indore; ABV-India Institute of Information Technology and Management, Gwalior; Indian Institute of Quality Management, Jaipur; Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India, Ahmadabad, and many other places.



He has trained over 2,500 guides and tour leaders. He has designed several training programmes to be rolled out all over India. He has travelled extensively within the sub-continent to deliver these training programmes, has carried out research for various agencies such as UGC, ICSSR, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and MoT-GoI worth around `5 million, and has also sourced/designed/coordinated/delivered trainings and consultancies worth around `45 million. He is a recipient of many prestigious awards and fellowships in and outside of India such as the AICTE Career Award for Young Teachers; SIDA Fellowship, Sweden; Guest Scholarship, Sweden; Linnaeus Palme Exchange Programme Grants, Sweden; PIMG Research Excellence Award, Gwalior; and Scholars' Grant (EMTM), Erasmus Mundus, Europe among others. He is a referred researcher in the field of tour leadership and has published on the subject in many international journals. He has supervised doctoral level researchers on tour leadership. He has authored eight books and more than hundred papers.