critical thinking in hospitality industry

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Critical Thinking and Hospitality Management Education: Exploring Potentials and Possibilities

Critical thinking has been praised as one of the most valuable dispositions university could offer to students who are pursuing a higher education. A number of theoreticians have proposed various forms of critical thinking, leading to the broadening of its definition, and the political and moral emphasis of its practice. Commenting on the current situation of hospitality management education, this paper presents the educational benefit of adopting one particular form of critical thinking, which is grounded in the educational philosophy of critical pedagogy, towards the teaching and learning of hospitality knowledge. And how such an educational experience plays a crucial role in promoting social wellbeing through the distinctive industrial landscape that the hospitality industries have forged.

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Hospitality & Society

Kelvin Zhang

This article employs criticality, a concept that embodies various intellectual values, to evaluate the forms and degree of criticality currently manifested in hospitality higher education. Criticality is discussed in relation to the academic well-being of hospitality as an academic subject. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 55 academics working in nine universities in the United Kingdom, capturing how they interpret criticality in relation to teaching hospitality courses and conducting hospitality research. The study revealed that conceptualizations of criticality in relation to the academic subject of hospitality largely occupy an uncritical conceptual space. Hospitality is restrictively understood with its commercial manifestations, namely ‘the hotel industry’, with alternative understandings of hospitality and hospitality offerings largely missing. The primary purpose of teaching criticality is perceived as an essential competency crucial for graduate employability. Critical research is perceived as studies that are relevant and applicable to ‘the hotel industry’. The conceptualizations of criticality revealed an unwelcoming academic community, whereby a dismissive attitude was expressed towards alternative approaches to the study of hospitality. With the prevalent neoliberal influences on higher education, an uncritical conceptual space of hospitality raises serious concerns regarding the future development of hospitality as an academic subject in higher education.

Simone Fullagar

Cecile Benitez

Monica Berger

"This article describes a library workshop for freshman hospitality management students enrolled at New York City College of Technology, CUNY, which features a focus on critical thinking. An active learning experience uses an element of surprise. Students evaluate the Website of a bankrupt company where information about the company’s situation is not obvious. When the instructor guides the class to find unbiased information from newspapers, many students begin to think critically about sources."

Peter Lugosi

This paper discusses the development of critical hospitality management research (CHMR) and explores key issues that such approaches raise. The paper is split into two parts. The first reviews contemporary writings that reflect the changing nature of hospitality management research and accounts for the emergence of a critical tradition. The second part identifies eight areas which are central concerns for the future development of CHMR: criticality, ethics and advocacy, scale, claims of legitimacy and research quality, representation, audience, affiliation, institutions and institutional contexts, and the relationship between management research and pedagogy. Associated questions and challenges are surfaced and conclusions drawn.

Kellee Caton , Yaniv Belhassen

The Routledge Handbook of Tourism and Hospitality Education

José-Carlos García-Rosell

Although problem-based learning (PBL) has been widely discussed in relation to tourism and hospitality education, the socially mediated and discursive nature of PBL approaches to tourism and hospitality education has been either neglected or given only cursory coverage in the literature. Most tourism and hospitality educators view PBL as an instruction method used to support students in acquiring and applying knowledge and professional competencies for managing tourism organizations in a rapidly and changing economy. Furthermore, due to its role in promoting teamwork, creativity and leadership, among other skills, PBL is regarded as a practical way to respond to the criticism that tourism and hospitality education lacks rigor and relevance. This view of PBL is in line with the idea of transforming educational processes into a matter of economic efficiency at the service of the tourism industry, rather than a matter of building societies. By drawing on the postmodern social-constructivist perspective on experiential learning and the relational social-constructionist orientation to management learning, I problematize PBL, arguing that it should also allow students to critically evaluate, analyze, and question the basic premises underlying contemporary tourism and hospitality practices. According to this view, PBL should go beyond the idea of producing human capital for the labor market to create spaces where students are encouraged to critically challenge the underlying assumptions of managerial tourism practices and to think more reflexively about how these assumptions affect other people’s lives. The application of PBL as a critical reflexive pedagogical tool is illustrated here using examples from a first-person action research study focusing on the development and implementation of two CSR courses based on hybrid PBL at the University of Lapland, Finland, between the years 2007 and 2010.

Drawing on qualitative data gathered from educators based in the United Kingdom, this paper examines their perceptions of significant challenges facing contemporary hospitality management education. These include: engaging contemporary students, particularly through new technologies; the growing presence of international students; institutional constraints, resource pressures and the distinctiveness of hospitality management education; ongoing tensions between hospitality's intellectual development and its practice focus; and new course designs, delivery models and partnerships. The study also explores their views on how those are likely to evolve in the future. The findings suggest that many of the key challenges are not unique to the hospitality management area, but they also highlight many pressing concerns specific to this sector. Importantly, the findings help to identify how individuals and institutions are responding to particular challenges in higher education. Highlights Explores challenges in supporting contemporary students and international cohorts Reflects on institutional constraints and the intensification of academic work Examines the position of hospitality education within business schools and faculties Highlights tensions between hospitality's intellectual growth and its practice focus Considers impacts of new course designs, partnerships and models of delivery

Technology and Innovation in Learning, Teaching and Education

Daniela Pedrosa

Studies in Higher Education

Martin Davies

This study investigates all available literature related to critical thinking in business education in a survey of publications in the field produced from 1990-2019. It conducts a thematic analysis of 787 articles found in Web of Science and Google Scholar, including a specific focus on 55 highly-cited articles. The aim is to investigate the importance of critical thinking in business education, how it is conceptualised in business education research, the business contexts in which critical thinking is situated, and the key and more marginal themes related to critical thinking outlined in the business and business education literature. The paper outlines six key areas and topics associated with those areas. It suggests future directions for further scholarly work in the area of critical thinking in business education.

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Crisis-driven creativity: how fresh thinking is keeping hospitality’s lights on during the pandemic

For hoteliers, and the businesses that support them, the Covid-19 pandemic is an existential battle that must be won, with jobs and livelihoods at stake. The good news is that with crisis comes creativity – we interviewed three Swiss-based professionals who spoke candidly about innovative ways they are adapting to the ‘new normal’.

This has been a year to forget for many in the hospitality sector. A world under virtual house arrest, with people unable or unwilling to travel, to experience, to mix or mingle. Impossible conditions in which to run a hotel or restaurant profitably.

From a public health perspective, Switzerland fared comparatively well during the first wave of the pandemic, back in spring 2020. The country saw significantly lower levels of infections and deaths than many European neighbors, despite being located in the heart of the continent.

Did this translate to good news for the Swiss hospitality industry in the spring/early summer period? Not a bit of it. “We had about a 80% drop off in guests,” says Cyril Derderding, Managing Director at FRAM Hospitality , which operates five hotels and one restaurant in Switzerland.

Just ponder that figure for a moment. Eighty per cent . If your business or employer saw that proportion of its revenue disappear virtually overnight, do you think it could survive? As it happens, Cyril’s hotels kept the lights on throughout the darkest times of Covid crisis, relying primarily on income provided by the group’s long stay resident guests.

“Our clientele comes mainly from the USA, China and the UK, and our segment is more business travel than leisure,” notes Cyril. “Unfortunately, these groups are simply not travelling at the moment, so in summer we had to switch our focus towards leisure guests. It was quite a change to have to deal with questions on the best restaurants, places to visit and tourist attractions!”

Cyril adds that it was a strategic decision to keep the group’s hotels open come what may, in order to maintain their places in the algorithms of the OTAs.

“We played that game,” he says. “We were also able to reduce our staff costs using furlough schemes, plus we outsource things like housekeeping, maintenance and F&B, so our permanent employee base is quite low anyway.

“With our long-staying resident guests, we have contracts that we don’t want to break. So we prefer to think in terms of a tough few years; then, when borders reopen and people can fly again, we’ll be here and ready for them. This way our resident customers know that we remained there for them during the hard times.”

A new meaning to ‘room service’

A similar tale emerges from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel de la Paix Geneva , where Yoann Pahud is Director of Sales and Marketing. This luxury property relies on international guests for 90% of its bookings. However, unlike the FRAM properties it opted to close its doors, shuttering from the end of March to the end of May.

When the lights came back on again, the rooms stayed stubbornly empty. And so it was time to deploy creative thinking to earn some much-needed revenue.

Yoann explains, “Restaurants in Geneva were starting to reopen, but we were seeing a reluctance among diners to expose themselves to a risk of infection by being in such public spaces.

“So we came up with this idea to offer private dining in our suites, which we called ‘Geneva Private Dining’. People could book a table as normal, but enjoy their dinner away from any other guests, in a beautiful private space. They could use the suite’s lounge area for an aperitif, enjoy a glass of Champagne on their balcony with views over Lake Geneva, then eat food prepared by their own dedicated chef and served by their own waiter.

“We saw real potential in marketing this ultra-privacy angle and so we engaged a PR consultancy to help us publicize it. We went on national TV, radio, and we were all over social media. Business-wise it’s been working quite well so far.”

Yoann Pahud

Another innovation launched by the hotel trades on the celebrated Genevois appetite for brunch. With the hotel’s restaurant running at reduced capacity, it struggled to cope with demand for brunch. So Yoann and his team devised a Brunch Basket that could be ordered and collected from the hotel, then enjoyed in the park, by the lake or in the customer’s home.

Finally, and perhaps most creatively, the hotel’s fine dining restaurant, Fiskebar, burst out from its four walls and onto a special floating terrace in the lake (see main image) offering outdoor, socially distanced Michelin-star dining throughout the summer months.

“Some of these ideas just popped up while we were walking beside the lake – for example our floating Fiskebar – while others like the private dining experience came from long brainstorming sessions where we would think of 50 ideas and then whittle them down into workable concepts,” explains Yoann.

“The big advantage of them all is that they were very ‘Instagrammable’, so we quickly built up word of mouth on social media. That was important, because we didn’t have the resources for a large-scale paid marketing push.”

Stepping up for hotel clients

While hoteliers were dipping into their wells of creativity, for the businesses that supply products and services to the hospitality industry a different, but no less challenging, dynamic has been at play.

An example is Hotel Spider , which is a subscription-based software solution that enables hotels to synchronize their pricing with online booking platforms.

“We work with flat fee subscriptions, and since we haven’t lost any customers our revenues are stable,” says Marco Baurdoux, one of the company’s founders.

“This means we’ve been able to devote our time to helping our hotel customers adapt their online sales as much as possible to these new and different situations. For example, we investigated the various aid packages that were offered by governments in some of our core markets, so we could help our clients find the right information for their hotel.”

The company also freely offered new technologies that could integrate with meta search channels like Trivago and Google, enabling hotels to provide updated information on their Covid-safety measures.

Adapt to today… and look for a better tomorrow

So, what has this crisis taught hoteliers? “Resilience is the most important,” says FRAM’s Cyril Dederding. “Also adaptability. We are here, we want to stay open, so we need to adapt to new customers if our main customer segment isn’t traveling.”

Yoann Pahud agrees, adding, “We had to completely re-learn everything that we thought we knew… and actually just forget everything we’d learned before. In this way we can be reactive to this very fast-changing environment. With limited staffing we learned to multi-task, for example. So reception staff learned how to serve customers in the restaurant, while restaurant staff learned how to deliver our private dining experience.”

As this article was being completed, Europe was still grappling with the so-called second wave of Covid-19. However, with faster tests and effective vaccines now appearing on the horizon, the hospitality industry can begin to look towards a brighter future when travel and tourism starts to climb back towards pre-pandemic levels.

“The world is going to come back to hospitality,” says Hotel Spider’s Marco Baurdoux.

“Within the Marriott group, there is definitely an amazing database of ideas and brains working together in order to recover as fast as we can, as well as to develop the new generation of hotels and experiences,” adds Yoann Pahud.

“Because nothing is going to be the same after this; so we must adapt.”

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Why do creative people become Hospitality stars?

June 14, 2021 •

6 min reading

If you’re a creative person, you might think that a career in the hospitality industry would put an end to your inspiration and ideas. It might seem like an industry of staying within the rules and limitations. Maybe you would need to save your creativity for your hobbies. But the truth is, creative minds are an asset to the hospitality industry. People with outside-the-box thinking and unique ideas are able to thrive in this industry and help their employers improve how business is done.

There are many ways creativity can come into play in the hospitality sector. Here are some ways it could help you shine.

Positive attributes of creative people

Creative people can have certain traits that make them especially valuable in hospitality careers. These  creative characteristics  include:

• Problem-solving skills
• Personal responsibility of tasks
• Openness to ideas and information
• Willingness to change and adapt
• Openness to new duties, roles or methods
• Interest in trying new things
• Facing challenges and uncertainty with optimism
• Able to question the status quo
• Able to empathize with other people

Generally, creative people can be good at meeting the needs of a company and adjusting as those needs change. They are able to think and find solutions to problems as needed. These are just the kinds of people that are needed in positions devoted to:

• Satisfying customers
• Leading employees
• Keeping hospitality businesses competitive

The importance of innovation in Hospitality

Over time, the hospitality industry has been putting  an emphasis on innovation . Industry professionals are encouraging their staff and management to be creative with everyday practices and offerings for guests. For example, Hyatt created a council that in part thinks of innovative changes that could improve guest experience. Similarly, the Lopesan Hotel Group created workshops to encourage ideas from employees. Especially when staff or management know their roles, techniques and best practices, they have some room to find creative ways to make improvements.

Thinking differently can be used in many areas of hospitality processes and practices. For example, Director of People Support at Hersha Hospitality Management, Joe Heck, said that creativity can help with  better hiring practices . He spoke of the example of high turnover in housekeeping. He and other hospitality professionals have explained that different hiring practices from normal can be helpful in areas like this. Examples include:

• Open interviews with many applicants in quick sessions of five to seven minutes.
• Referral programs.
• Continuous recognition of housekeeping employees.
• Simplifying the application process to remove roadblocks (e.g. to reach a younger demographic, it’s important to make it possible to apply via mobile phone).

Creativity helps brands stay afloat and move forward

It’s helpful for creative people to be in workplaces that encourage innovation and ideas. Hospitality companies that are conducive to these types of people have channels of communication open for employees to share their ideas. They allow trial-and-error testing to try out new things and see how guests respond. They need to be able to bend slightly on standardization between hotels, allowing staff to create personalized, unique experiences.

Coming up with new ideas can help brands stay competitive during normal times but especially during challenging times like the recent pandemic. Innovative thinkers are needed to help hotels and other travel businesses adapt as times change.

For example, Finance Director of New World Wuhan Hotel, Janet Yan, said that COVID-19 and lockdown caused the hotel’s finance team to think about  how to bring business to the hotel  restaurants. They thought of ways to shift from their normal business and recreational trip clients to local business through consumer channels. They shifted the types of food they served and the experience to cater to a new audience and shifting consumer needs. They focused on affordable staples that could be picked up or delivered and found new ways to reach customers, including through neighborhood-based online chat groups. They researched current trends online and adapted to the situation, succeeding with their experiment.

This is simply one example of how creativity can help a hotel adapt and continue to do business, even during challenges. Thinking in new ways can lead to opportunities and help a hospitality brand adapt to the changes in society and consumer expectations.

SERVICE EXCELLENCE TOOLKIT With this 7-step process, you will have all the tools you need to master your company Customer Experience.

Creativity is valuable at all levels.

Creative traits are important for staff in all positions of the hospitality hierarchy. Staff that carry out the day-to-day processes and interact directly with customers need to adapt to changes and challenges in ways that fit the situation. Also, they are the ones who can institute ideas and practices on the ground.

Nonetheless, creativity is equally important at higher levels of hospitality management. When hotels and related businesses want to expand, change or move into new markets, they need a sense of vision and new ideas to get them where they want to go. For example, President for Greater China of Wyndham Hotel Group, Leo Liu Chenjun, believes that  creativity is important for this industry . He said, “If you’re a creative person, then you can find new angles and new ways to solve new problems.” That’s what he has done as his career has brought him in different directions, helping various companies to expand and build their brands. Unique ways of thinking has helped him with creating strategies and taking risks on new ways forward.

Sometimes, brands need to adapt to new customers and markets, so they need to think differently from what they have done before. In the case of Wyndham Hotel Group, Chenjun explained that he couldn’t bring the same hotel concept found in the United States into China, but instead needed to target hotels in this area to Chinese customers.

Catering to creatives

Putting a focus on creativity does not need to stop at the brand and its processes. Thinking outside-the-box can also extend to customers. A relatively new trend in the industry is private member club start-ups that are catering directly to “creatives,” such as writers, musicians, artists, actors and entrepreneurs. These clubs provide a space for like-minded individuals to come together. They offer specific amenities targeted to this group, including meeting spaces, workspace, private offices, libraries and event venues. Some offer sub-communities and programming for members and guests to interact with.

While this example focuses on a creative clientele, it’s not too difficult to imagine how a creative staff would connect with the target audience and develop the right experience. Sharing the artsy mindset could help staff develop the programming, events and spaces for this clientele. CEO of the research and training company the Luxury Institute, Milton Pedraza, noted that one such  creative hospitality brand , BrodyLand, was able to stand out against competition through a mixture of creativity, authenticity and celebrity guests.

Combine best practices with innovation

You can see from these examples that creative thinking is valuable in all aspects of the hospitality industry. It is helpful within everyday processes and in broader plans and strategies. Creative traits are useful at all staff levels and in different workplaces. Hospitality brands can be rewarded when they allow their staff to share ideas and adapt to situations, and they benefit from thinking innovatively on a broader scale. For these reasons, creative people can shine within these roles.

It’s a good idea to put these skills and personality traits on a hospitality resume and for hiring managers to look for them. However, thinking outside the box is most effective when you understand the box. In other words, a strong  education in hospitality  can give you an understanding of the industry and best practices. Then, you will know when to stick to tradition and when to get creative.

Business Development Senior Manager - Consultant at EHL

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