<![CDATA[In the global aviation and tourism sectors, travel service professionals are expected to provide exceptional hospitality, demonstrate cross-cultural competence and functional linguistic agility, and ensure passenger satisfaction and safety. Vocational high schools often have a significant competency gap, with high career expectations undermined by poor communication skills and an inability to convert regional cultural assets into interactive services. This community service initiative aimed to equip the students with local-wisdom storytelling techniques for tour guiding and enhance their in-flight hospitality skills, particularly in handling passenger requests and complaints. A Participatory Training approach was implemented with an interactive framework spanning stages of exploring, understanding, planning, direct role-play action, and impact evaluation. The project involved 24 Travel Service Business (ULW) cadets at SMK Penerbangan Sriwijaya Palembang. The evaluation of the initial session revealed that the students' attained a satisfactory level of storytelling skills, with an overall mean score of 2.97. A paired-sample test for the second session demonstrated a statistically significant improvement in the in-flight communication, from pre-test score of M = 73.46 (SD = 14.26) to post-test score of M = 85.40 (SD = 5.10), with large effect size (Cohen's d = 0.86). The sharp decline of standard deviation demonstrated that training intervention has shown to effectively reduce communication anxiety, enhance speaking fluency, and minimise the linguistic competence gap among students. The findings suggest that participatory and simulation-based hospitality training can effectively prepare vocational students for professional aviation service environments.]]>
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