Authentic teaching and learning is a critical pedagogy and curriculum requirement in higher education to better prepare for the future workforce. As such, educators adopt a suite of authentic assessments such as work-integrated learning, industry reports, and field trip reports to engage in relevant industry issues. Despite the pertinence of embedding authenticity in Tourism, Hospitality and Events (THE) curriculum, a paucity of studies has investigated authentic related research in THE higher education. In this paper, the authentic learning three factor model (construction of knowledge, disciplined inquiry, and value beyond school) was commissioned to evaluate the perceptions of academics in THE higher education towards their understanding and embeddedness of authentic elements in their teaching curriculum to better prepare graduates for industry readiness. Personal in-depth interviews were conducted with higher education THE academics (n=21) in Australia, New Zealand, The Netherlands and Scotland. Our thematic analysis uses NVivo . The paper present the research process, and highlights initial findings.