The low rate of employment in the industry for tourism undergraduates has been troubling the academia, educational institutions and the industry. But research on students' perceptions of tourism as a career for employment mainly concentrates on the effects of the industry characteristics, tourism courses, job satisfactions, and career orientation. It rarely explains the phenomenon and solves the problem from the undergraduates perspectives to explore the influencing factors when they consider a career and perceive tourism as a career choice. Furthermore, academic researchers usually take hotel as the field of tourism and seldom include travel agencies in their research of students' perceptions of tourism employment. This article explores the factors influencing undergraduates' choice of a career and their perceptions of travel agency as a career choice by analyzing a sample of 594 valid questionnaires. The study is an application of Richardson Scale Measurement among tourism undergraduates at Sun Yat-sen University and Jiangxi Normal University, and reports an IPA analysis with the collected data. Results indicates that; (1) Richardson Scale Measurement is a useful tool to measure the factors influencing Chinese tourism undergraduates, choice of a career and their perceptions of travel agency as a career choice. Data analysis result shows that the Cronbach (a) coefficient of the overall scale is 0. 824, indicating a high reliability of the scale. It also has a good internal consistency reliability, and can be applied to measure students' perceptions of tourism employment. (2) Compared with their career choice factors and their perceptions of travel agency as a career, students rate "colleagues that I can get along with", "a job that I will find enjoyable", and "good promotion prospects" as the three most valuable factors, but they do not believe that travel agency will offer them. (3) Students think "the opportunity to travel abroad", "a job where I can use my university degree", and "job mobility" are the most important factors when considering travel agency as a career choice, but they attach a very low value to them. (4) Through the IPA analysis with the data, the undergraduates' negative perceptions of travel agency are; work time conflict with family life, heavy workload, and low starting salary. The positive perceptions are; travel agency can make high skills, and has a sense of responsibility. According to the results of this study, the reason why the low rate of employment in the industry for tourism undergraduates is that the students do not believe that tourism industry will offer the factors they find most valuable when choosing a career, and the factors they think tourism industry can offer are not valued by the students. This article also presents the appropriate countermeasures to improve the low rate of industry employment of tourism undergraduates. Hence, travel agency should continuously improve the work environment, and adjust recruitment policy to attract professional labors ; educational institutions should actively develop the students' positive perceptions of travel agency as a career choice; students should strengthen their professional ethics.