Editorial in special issue: The call for papers for this Special Issue of JTTT invited authors who seek to explore purposeful tourism in tourism education. It was a call that encouraged the ambition to move beyond “business as usual” and venture into writing papers that seek to radically challenge and debate the purpose of tourism itself, as well as tourism education. This is an ambition found in the network Tourism Education Futures Initiative (TEFI). TEFI understands purpose as the motivation behind actions, be they the planned design of a teaching session, intentional business models, or any other phenomena that is based on a value-driven sense of “why we do what we do”.