Hospitality Insights

Editorial

Shelagh Mooney — 2023-12-29

Kia ora koutou

Kia ora and welcome to the latest issue of Hospitality Insights. The journal provides open access to short, peer reviewed summaries of research and think pieces, for the hospitality industry and community. This current issue presents four diverse articles. The first is an opinion piece on inhospitality, explaining how this can occur when an overload in hospitable practices reaches a tipping point and becomes, ‘hospitality fatigue’. The second article looks at the potential of older workers, a frequently overlooked sector of the workforce, and suggests that the hospitality industry consider the benefits they may offer to the industry as a whole. The third ponders the similarities between tourism and zombiism, asking whether insights from this specific genre might provide fresh ideas for dealing with the resurgent problems of over-tourism. Finally, the fourth article offers insights into workplace toxicity, and why, after the stresses and disruptions of the past few years, it warrants closer attention from hospitality professionals.

The Importance of Inhospitality

Paul Lynch — 2023-12-29

In order to better understand what is hospitality, we need a much deeper understanding of what is inhospitality? In the late 1990s in the United Kingdom, hospitality researchers came together to discuss and debate ‘hospitality… [as] worthy of serious academic study and [which] could potentially inform both industrial practice and academic endeavour.[1]’ The discussion had important implications for the advancement of knowledge in the hospitality subject, whether for hospitality management or simply the study of hospitality, and its positioning within the academic sphere, as well as for recognition of the quality of hospitality higher education programmes. The debates were very influential in the development of the study of hospitality. Today, a similar discussion and debate is required regarding what is inhospitality in order to inform not only the hospitality subject and industrial practice but also to contribute to social advancement.

Are older workers a saviour for recruitment problems in the hospitality industry?

Andrew Jenkins — 2023-12-29

This opinion piece discusses the potential for older workers to help alieviate recruitment problems in the hospitality industry. These problems have been made worse by the Covid-19 Pandemic and, in the UK, by Brexit and changes to immigration rules. There are many advantages of employing older workers in the hospitality industry but there is a persistent paradigm that older workers are resistent to change, have higher levels of absenteeism and possess poor IT skills. As many of the issues associated with barriers to the employment of older workers are due to negative stereotying and subtle bias, the author advocates the application of Implicit Bias Theory to uncover and subsequetly help address discrimination against older workers.

Tourism and Zombism An evil mirror

Mairead McEntee — 2023-12-29

Workplace toxicity during disruptions

Alisha Ali — 2023-12-29