Why Hospitality Schools Need Virtual Prototyping to Prepare Digitally Work-Ready Graduates

Hospitality management education can use immersive training and digital prototypes to help students develop digital fluency through applied projects.

“Hospitality will always be a people business, but our graduates now enter workplaces built on apps, data and AI-driven tools. If we don’t give them the digital fluency to work confidently with those tools, we’re not preparing them for the industry they’re walking into,” says Dr. Sebastian A. Balart Sanchez, Lecturer in Digitalisation and Research at Hotelschool The Hague."

New and entry-level workers in the hospitality industry often lack the digital proficiency needed for work readiness and for applying digital technologies effectively. That gap is exactly what pushed Balart Sanchez and his colleagues to build simulation-based training and AI-enabled programs into the curriculum — starting with the digital foundations of data literacy that let students engage critically with the rapidly expanding range of generative AI tools.

Building digital proficiency into the curriculum

“The goal isn’t to replace human interaction with technology,” Balart Sanchez says. “It’s to give students a safe space to rehearse, fail and improve before they’re standing in front of a guest.”

A first step is to bring familiar real-world operational experiences, such as onboarding training, check-ins, food and beverage preparation, and interactions with difficult guests, into immersive virtual environments through virtual reality (VR) experiences for hospitality students. VR experiences place students in realistic scenarios in a safe and asynchronous manner, reducing the pressure of interacting with actual guests, the urgency to respond immediately, and the challenge of acclimating to the setting. For example, a cocktail training simulation (Fig. 1) can prepare students for a practical deployment or rotation within the curriculum by allowing them to rehearse procedures, receive feedback, and build confidence before entering a real service environment.

"What makes VR valuable here isn't the novelty, it's repetition without consequence. A student can run the same guest interaction ten times, adjust their approach based on what didn't work, and walk into the real service floor having already made their mistakes in private," says Dr. Praneschen (Che) Govender

Demystifying Gen AI to achieve digital fluency

Digital proficiency, or digital fluency, in the age of generative AI can be developed more effectively when students first build strong foundations in data literacy. Understanding how information is collected, organised, interpreted, and transformed allows learners to engage with AI tools critically rather than treating them as neutral or automatic sources of knowledge.

Generative AI outputs are shaped by the data used to train them and the way users construct their prompts, which makes these tools prone to mistakes, bias, outdated information, and misleading results. Students need to understand what a system was trained on and evaluate whether its output is appropriate for a specific hospitality context.

“If we want graduates who can question an AI system instead of blindly trusting it, they need to understand how these systems are built before they start relying on them,” Balart Sanchez explains.

From ideation to prompt design to physical prototyping

One way hospitality bachelor’s students can learn how systems are built is by experimenting with them and analysing them through generative AI prompts, either by constructing them step by step or by dissecting their outputs. A clear example of this is a minimum viable product for a guest check-in app (Fig. 2), developed entirely through generative AI prompting. In building it, students expand their creative capabilities while developing skills that move from idea generation, to prompt design, to a working digital prototype.

Exploring all the stages required to design an app for virtual and secure check-in allows students to better understand how hospitality processes are structured. Taking time to critically evaluate the type of data collected and how each process is organised can strengthen students’ understanding, sense of virtual ownership, work readiness, and ability to hold software providers accountable when quality standards are not met. The result is a graduate who isn't simply a software user, but someone who understands the system well enough to have built it themselves.

Where virtual meets reality

Hospitality management graduates need to become work-ready with generative AI tools and confident navigating different digital platforms. Just as students already practise operations across different areas of the hotel, they also need structured opportunities to practise with digital tools.

Progress has been made by bringing hospitality management students closer to new ideas through a designated Makerspace where virtual and real prototyping meet (Fig. 3).

Technological advancements have changed how hotels and restaurants are managed, and hospitality schools must build that same digital fluency into their programs. A Makerspace supports this by giving students a safe space where digital and physical experimentation intersect — testing generative AI outputs, evaluating how guests behave online, and turning ideas into physical prototypes through 3D printing. 

“The schools that treat digital fluency as optional risk sending graduates into an industry that has already moved on,” Balart Sanchez says. At Hotelschool The Hague, the Makerspace is where that philosophy gets put into practice — and he expects more hospitality schools to follow.