  The tourism and hospitality industry worldwide has been confronted with the
problem of attracting and retaining quality employees. If today's students are
to become the effective practitioners of tomorrow, it is fundamental to
understand their perceptions of tourism employment. Therefore, this research
aims at investigating the perceptions of hospitality students at the Faculty of
Tourism in Alexandria University towards the industry as a career choice. A
self-administrated questionnaire was developed to rate the importance of 20
factors in influencing career choice, and the extent to which hospitality as a
career offers these factors. From the results, it is clear that students
generally do not believe that the hospitality career will offer them the
factors they found important. However, most of respondents (70.6%) indicated
that they would work in the industry after graduation. Finally, a set of
specific remedial actions that hospitality stakeholders could initiate to
improve the perceptions of hospitality career are discussed.
