The rapid growth of tourism in Hungary and the labour migration to abroad resulted in a serious labour shortage in the industry. One of the sources of skilled and motivated workforce is the system of tourism vocational education and training, which can just slowly react to market changes due to its inertness. In addition, the highly centralized system provides low-level of freedom to respond to regional differences, as the National Core Curriculum and its related regulatory documents are compulsory for the institutions and maintainers implementing them.

This paper seeks for possible solutions to the prevailing challenges by a comparative examination of the tourism VET system in Finland and Hungary. As a result the author propounds possible alternatives to develop secondary tourism education.