From skills discovery to social impact: Policy & practice

Abstract

This commentary examines how Transferable Skills in Tourism and Hospitality evolved into a platform for policy influence and social innovation through storytelling. We use this journey to interrogate how ideas migrate across disciplinary, institutional, and social boundaries when empathy becomes both subject and method. Rather than recounting outcomes, we reflect on what this trajectory reveals about impact dynamics, knowledge translation, and tourism's epistemic potential as a social science of connection. By tracing the interplay between academic discovery and narrative-based translation into policy and educational practice, we argue that tourism research can advance beyond sectoral confines, contributing to human development and collective wellbeing through creative translation and affective scholarship.