Hospitable futures: Preparing talents and understanding the technology to create meaningful encounters

Hotelschool The Hague is organising and hosting an international symposium with the central theme: Hospitable futures: Preparing talents and understanding the technology to create meaningful encounters

The hospitality and tourism industry is one of the strongest growing industries in the world. New business models and trends keep on emerging that aim to enable better, more intense and innovative, meaningful hospitality experiences. The future of hospitality looks bright.

However, the hospitality industry is also facing serious challenges such as labour shortages, low compensation as compared to other industries, a poor image as employer (discouraging women), overtourism, a growing ecological footprint based on current tourist arrival projections, meeting the UN sustainable development goals, and technological advancements that challenge established hospitality businesses to find ways to adjust.

This conference aims to get back to the core of what hospitality is about, i.e. meaningful encounters: positive, welcoming, genuinely service-oriented interactions between humans and between humans and tech-enabled non-humans. Meaningful hospitality encounters depend on two key components: human talent and technology.

Human talent is the most important one of these two, since it is the center of hospitable service delivery and guest experience provision or the designing and monitoring factor in a technology-enabled guest or customer experience.

Technology is the service facilitator or an experience enhancer. In today's globalising platform economy, hospitality services are established most dominantly via technology-enabled platforms or networks. At the human interaction level, technology can deliver, support or intensify the hospitality experience.

This symposium aims to address the burning question of how the hospitality industry in the broadest sense can deal with the key challenges mentioned and how can dealing with these challenges turned into or contribute to meaningful hospitality encounters. The symposium seeks to provide the setting for a productive dialogue among practitioners and academics. It will facilitate an academic discussion around the papers presented with the aim of contributing to making studies and outcomes fit for publication.

For more information please contact HDH Research

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