Literature review of hospitality industry essay

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1, No. 1. ISSN: 1473-8376 www.

hlst. ltsn. ac. uk/johlste Finding the Hospitality Industry Paul Slattery (paul. com) Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein 20 Fenchurch Street, London, UK.

DOI: 10. 3794/johlste. 11. 7 ? Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism Education Abstract Some academics from the UK have published a conception of hospitality, which they argue is the basis for the understanding of the hospitality industry and for teaching and research in hospitality management (Brotherton, 1999; Lashley, 2000; Lashley and Morrison (eds. , 2000). This paper is in two parts. First, I will review the fundamental ideas proposed in these publications to illustrate that they degrade the hospitality industry.

In the second part, I will introduce necessary contexts of the hospitality business, which they ignore and which render their approach redundant both for understanding the industry and as an effective basis for teaching and research in hospitality management. Keywords: three-domain approach, hospitality, industry, context Part I: In search of hospitalityConrad Lashley and Alison Morrison, (Lashley and Morrison (eds. ), 2000), start from the view that the understanding of hospitality has been impaired by an industrial myopia.

They propose to improve the understanding by; “ reflecting insights into the study of hospitality that encompass the commercial provision of hospitality and the hospitality industry, yet at the same time recognise that hospitality needs to be explored in a private domestic setting and studies hospitality as a social phenomenon involving relationships between people. ” (Lashley and Morrison (eds. , 2000: xvi) There are six chapters and Lashley’s introduction in which the gist of the social and private domains of hospitality is established. They are: An Anthropology of Hospitality, by Tom Selwyn; The Philosophy of Hospitableness, by Elizabeth Telfer; The Hospitality Trades: a Social History, by John K. Walton; Putting Up? Gender Hospitality and Performance, by Jane Darke and Craig Gurney; Home and Commercialised Hospitality, by Paul Lynch and Doreen MacWhannell; and Mediated Meanings of Hospitality: Television Personality Food Programmes, by Sandie Randall.

Of these nine academics only Lashley, Lynch and Randall are employed to teach hospitality management. The editors mention Paul Slattery advises hospitality companies on merger, acquisition and strategic activities. He recently advised Compass Group on the disposal of the Forte Hotel Group, the largest ever hotel chain auction. He speaks regularly at international hospitality investment and strategy conferences and writes on hospitality industry issues. He is a graduate in hotel and catering management, has a research degree on The Hotel as an Organisation and is Visiting Professor in Hospitality Management at Oxford Brookes University. Slattery, P.

(2002) Finding the Hospitality Industry that some chapters were commissioned and others were volunteered without revealing which were which, and they provide no rationale for the inclusion of these particular chapters in the collection. The social domain According to Lashley, the inclusion of the social domain enables the understanding of; “ social settings in which acts of hospitality and acts of hospitableness take place together with the impacts of social forces on the production and consumption of food/drink/and accommodation”. Lashley and Morrison (eds. ), 2000: 5) Additionally, the social domain will rekindle the notion that in ancient, subsistence cultures, ‘ beliefs about hospitality and obligations to others were located in views and visions about the nature of society and the natural order of things’ (Lashley and Morrison (eds. ), 2000: 6).

Selwyn says that; “ The basic function of hospitality is to establish a relationship or to promote exchange of goods and services, both material and symbolic, between those who give hospitality (hosts) and those who receive it (guests)…

One of the principal functions of any act of hospitality… is to consolidate the recognition that hosts and guests share the same moral universe or…to enable the construction of a moral universe to which both host and guest agree to belong”. (Lashley and Morrison (eds. ), 2000: 19) I think that an indication of Selwyn’s concept of hospitality can be gained by applying it to classify relationships.

For instance, Osama bin Laden can be described as having been a guest of Mullah Mohamed Omar and his Taliban who provided hospitality to their guest and his associates in alQaeda. The hosts and guests shared the same moral universe and the hosts considered that they had a moral obligation to protect their guests despite the enormity of the case against them and their condemnation by most of the rest of humankind. This application illustrates that the social domain presents a loose perspective on social relationships that are not specific to venues as are the commercial and private domains.

Thus, the social domain is logically different from the other two. One implication of this for understanding the hospitality business is that the social domain becomes relegated to the status of interesting background material, like being able to speak a foreign language or to know about plumbing. If, in the identification of the social domain Selwyn, and Lashley too, are seeking to make the more important point that the social sciences provide a necessary perspective on the hospitality business, then I agree with them and indeed pioneered this position as far back as the early 1970s with my colleagues at what is now the University of Huddersfield. If this is their intent then the social domain needs to be rethought to include the full range of the social sciences, and they must be used to interpret hospitality events in hotels, restaurants and bars and to solve problems in these venues. Without this, the social domain as presented by Selwyn and Lashley is deprived of its power and relevance for those of us trying to make sense of and develop the hospitality business in the twentyfirst century. The private domainLashley believes that, ‘ to better understand hospitality activities we need to understand the provision of food, drink and accommodation in the nuclear family’ (Lashley and Morrison (eds.

), 2000: 10). He also makes the point that, ‘ the provision of food, drink and accommodation represents an act of friendship, it creates symbolic ties between people which establish bonds between those involved in sharing hospitality’ (Lashley and Morrison (eds. ), 2000: 11).

Then more generally he concludes that, Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism Education 1(1), 19-28 20 Slattery, P. (2002) Finding the Hospitality Industry ‘ hospitality is essentially a relationship based on hosts and guests’ (Lashley and Morrison (eds. ), 2000: 15). The Telfer chapter presents the private domain within which she defines hospitality as, ‘ the giving of food, drink and sometimes accommodation to people who are not regular members of a household’ (Lashley and Morrison (eds.

, 2000: 39) and concludes that; “ if a commercial host looks after his guests well out of genuine concern for their happiness and charges them reasonably, rather than extortionately, for what he does, his activities can be called hospitable. ” (Lashley and Morrison (eds. ), 2000: 45) She provides no insight into what, specifically, is entailed in looking after guests well; what, specifically, is genuine concern for happiness; and what, specifically, constitutes reasonable rather than extortionate charges. Neither does she provide any indication about how any of these terms would be measured. Declarations of this kind on the hospitality industry can only be regarded as gossip and of no value to professionals in the hospitality business.

There are two points that I need to make about the relevance of the private domain to the hospitality business. First, the very idea of the hospitality industry is that it occurs out of the home in venues designed to meet specific hospitality demand. The provision of hospitality to outsiders in the home is a marginal family activity, while in the hospitality business renting rooms, selling meals and selling drinks is the raison d’etre. The no-man’s land between the private domain and the hospitality business is the subject of the chapter by Lynch and MacWhannell who bring an understanding of the private domain to interpret quasi hotels such as bed and breakfasts and guest houses, which straddle the private and commercial domains, and are part-time homes and part-time businesses. My estimate, based on national UK data (Allin, 1999) and the DrKW hotel supply analysis is that quasi hotels account for around threequarters of serviced, short-term accommodation venues in the UK, around 20 per cent of the room nights available, but only about eight per cent of room nights sold. It is the most marginal segment of the short-term accommodation market and it is declining apace due to poor management, underinvestment, declining demand for this type of hospitality, and the continuing consolidation in the hotel market. The interpretation of quasi hotels provided by Lynch and MacWhannell is unlikely to stem the decline.

This is reinforced by three long-term historical trends: the progressive increase in the number of nights people spend away from home in hotels; the progressive increase in the proportion of meals eaten in restaurants, and the progressive increase in the range and frequency of the pursuit of out-ofhome leisure activities involving hospitality (Monopolies and Mergers Commission, 1989: 36). In parallel, tourism, which involves the hospitality industry as a significant component, has become the world’s largest industry and the long-term global growth projections are greater than for any other industry (The World Travel and Tourism Council, 2001). The record shows that when people achieve the standard of living to afford to buy hospitality, the frequency with which they choose it over private hospitality increases. The second point I need to make about the relevance of the private domain to the hospitality business is that it is inaccurate and misleading to assume that in the hospitality business the critical relationship is between host and guest. Hotels, restaurants, bars and the other hospitality venues are businesses where the critical relationship is between sellers and buyers. The buyers are not guests, they are customers. The relationship is not philanthropic it is economic. Applying the host-guest relationship from the social and private domains misses the point of the difference between a business and a home.

It is little wonder that confronted with the differences, the authors conclude that hospitality in the business domain is inferior because customers have to pay. Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism Education 1(1), 19-28 21 Slattery, P. (2002) Finding the Hospitality Industry The commercial domain There are two features of Lashley’s interpretation of the commercial domain that make it unacceptable. First, it is interpreted in terms that are derived from the social and private domains. He announces that, ‘ on receiving genuine hospitality, the individual feels genuinely wanted and welcome. This is not the same thing as being welcomed as a valued customer’ (Lashley and Morrison (eds. ), 2000: 13). He further states that; “ In some cases, [in the commercial domain] acts of hospitality are entertained for calculative reasons: the business lunch, or the office Christmas party are not primarily redistributive or undertaken for reasons which primarily value generosity and good behaviour as a host.

” (Lashley and Morrison (eds. , 2000: 12) This theme is continued in chapter 14, Consuming Hospitality on Holiday, by Hazel Andrews who interprets the relationship between tour operator representatives and holidaymakers in Mallorca, Spain using the notion of host and guest proposed in the private domain. Unsurprisingly, she concludes that, ‘ the emergence of money payment in place of reciprocity and obligation have given rise to the questioning of whether such practices can in fact be hospitality’ (Lashley and Morrison (eds. ), 2000: 251). Andrews remains true to the three-domain zealots. If it is commercial it is inferior to the private.

In chapter nine, Managing Hospitality Operations, Andrew Lockwood and Peter Jones, both hospitality management academics, illustrate some of the differences in the processes between commercial hospitality and the other domains, but the promoters of the three-domain approach ignore their arguments. The commercial domain, as it is presented, is as daft as interpreting guests of the family as customers, calculating the return on investment for the family from any hospitality provided to outsiders or of conceiving of a chain of households to which can be applied the techniques of portfolio management. The second problem with Lashley’s interpretation of the commercial domain is that it is based solely on a radical and hostile perspective on business. Lashley instructs us that the, “ provision of hospitality activities is chiefly driven by the need to extract surplus value from the exchange. That commercial ‘ capitalistic’ imperative creates a number of tensions and contradictions that become apparent when we develop a better understanding of the ‘ social’ and ‘ private’ domains of hospitality activities”. Lashley and Morrison (eds.

), 2000: 13) To this he adds that, ‘ commercial hospitality provision depends on a reciprocity based on money exchange and limits on giving pleasure to guests…The exchange of money absolves the guest of mutual obligation and loyalty’ (Lashley and Morrison (eds. ), 2000: 13-14). Lashley’s exposition of the commercial domain is based on the assumption that if hospitality customers pay, then their enjoyment is compromised. The commercial domain condemns the hospitality business because it is a business. No professional involved in hospitality can accept this as a serious interpretation of the industry. It is also an interpretation that flies in the face of the historic and long-term future global growth in demand for professional hospitality services.

The three-domain approach The degradation of the hospitality industry is continued in chapter eight, Hospitality and Hospitality Management, by Bob Brotherton and Roy C. Wood, two hospitality management academics who seek, ‘ to locate and define hospitality within the real world of evidence’ (Lashley and Morrison (eds. , 2000: 135). They set out to avoid any reference to the ‘ narrow, commercial, economic and industrial perspective to defining hospitality’ (Lashley and Morrison (eds. ), 2000: 136). They complain that such definitions normally define hospitality, ‘ by inferring its nature from the industry activities which purportedly have grown up to service the need for (a specific kind of) hospitality which is defined and regulated by hospitality industry practices’ (Lashley and Morrison (eds. ), 2000: 137). Thus, they Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism Education 1(1), 19-28 2 Slattery, P.

(2002) Finding the Hospitality Industry explicitly exclude the hospitality industry from their ‘ real world of evidence’; it is inconvenient to the development of their approach. The outcome of their analysis, is a one sentence universal definition of hospitality designed to accommodate all three domains by covering the hospitality offered by Mullah Mohamed Omar to Osama bin Laden, a dinner party given in your home for some friends and the vast array of experiences offered in the full range of venues in the hospitality industry. They define hospitality as; “ a contemporaneous human exchange, which is voluntarily entered into and designed to enhance the mutual well being of the parties concerned through the provision of accommodation, and/or food, and/or drink. ” (Lashley and Morrison (eds. ), 2000: 142) They say that their definition ‘ captures the generic essence of hospitality, placing the issue of human exchange at the very heart of the hospitality concept’ (Lashley and Morrison (eds. ), 2000: 142). They then produce a one-sentence definition of the hospitality industry, which they see as; “ comprised of commercial organisations that specialise in providing accommodation and/or food, and/or drink through a voluntary human exchange, which is contemporaneous in nature and undertaken to enhance the mutual well being of the parties concerned. ” (Lashley and Morrison (eds.

), 2000: 143) This definition of the industry, along with their definition of hospitality, provides the basis on which they go on to define hospitality management in the industry as ‘ the professional management of the hospitality exchange process’ (Lashley and Morrison (eds. , 2000: 152). The initiative that started as an appeal for more divergent thinking about the understanding of hospitality became the three-domain approach, which encompasses the social, the private and the commercial domains as well as definitions of hospitality, the hospitality industry and hospitality management.

The three-domain approach explicitly excludes essential features of the industry so that what is left is a denuded and sterile conception of commercial hospitality and hospitality management that is portrayed as the poor relation to the hospitality available in the social and the private domains. Part II: The contexts of the hospitality business The prime exclusion from the three-domain approach is the contexts of the hospitality business. There are three levels of context, which are necessary for understanding the business and when incorporated, render the three-domain approach redundant for understanding the industry and therefore redundant as a basis for teaching and research in hospitality management. The industry context The hospitality industry is represented in every country in the world and is diverse and complex. It encompasses a range of free-standing hospitality businesses and is also a component of a wide range of venues whose primary function is not hospitality. At DrKW we find it effective to depict the structure of the hospitality industry as shown in Table 1.

As hospitality venues develop in size and complexity they include commonplace activities that do not fit with the three-domainers’ conception of hospitality. For example, most mid-market, up-market and luxury hotels have facilities to meet demand for conferences and health clubs. Similarly, cruise ships, theme parks, motorway service areas and multi-leisure centres have integral components that fall outside the scope of the three-domainers’ definition. A vivid example is from Las Vegas where there are 29 venues, each with more than 1000 rooms. Each venue also includes a major casino, a restaurant campus, at least one theatre, a conference and exhibition centre, a shopping mall, a health club, one has an aquarium, one has a circus and Bellagio and the Venetian each incorporate an art gallery. The fact that hospitality companies have the most natural skills to conceive and manage such fabulouslyJournal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism Education 1(1), 19-28 23 Slattery, P. (2002) Finding the Hospitality Industry complex venues requires us to incorporate within the hospitality industry all out-of-home subsistence and leisure activities that occur in the wide range of the specifically designed venues identified above.

This range of activities is legitimate and complementary for the companies and it is nonsense to imagine that only the parts of these companies that fit with the three-domainers’ definition can be considered to be hospitality. It would be even worse to exclude these businesses from the definition of the hospitality industry and place them outside the scope of hospitality management teaching and research. Moreover, to announce as Darke and Gurney do, that hospitality venues offer ‘ the services of a surrogate mother or wife’ (Lashley and Morrison (eds.

), 2000: 83) illustrates a radical misunderstanding of the industry. Hospitality companies also have progressively undertaken the management of leisure venues that include hospitality. The range of natural activities managed by hospitality companies extends beyond the minimals of renting rooms and selling meals and drinks as they seek to identify and supply facilities to meet the progressive growth in diversity of customer demand. Hospitality is an integral part of leisure venues and it devalues them to strip out the hospitality. For instance, in the UK bingo market the game itself is regulated to be virtually margin free. Thus, the game of bingo can be interpreted as an activity, which occurs between the consumption of the drinks and meals that provide the margin for the operators. To exclude the bingo from the hospitality is to miss a prime reason for customer attendance. To exclude the hospitality from the bingo is to miss the source of most of the profit of the venue.

Accordingly, the skills involved in conceiving and managing businesses such as bingo clubs and the other leisure venues have become incorporated into the repertoire of skills of the hospitality industry. The more that the scope, diversity and complexity of the hospitality industry evolves, the further removed it becomes from the three-domain approach. Free-Standing Hospitality Businesses Hotels Holiday centres Quasi hotels Cruise ships Time-share Bars Restaurants Hospitality in Leisure Venues Casinos Bingo clubs Night clubs Cinemas Theatres Sports stadia Theme parks Attractions Health clubs Table 1: The Structure of the Hospitality Industry (DrKW, 2001) Hospitality in Travel Venues Airports Rail stations Bus stations Ferry terminals Aeroplanes Trains Ferries Subsidised Hospitality Workplaces Health care Education Military Custodial Retailers The corporate contextAs economies develop, so the hospitality industry consolidates and chains of hospitality businesses replace unaffiliated venues as the key operators in the industry. In the UK, for example, between 1985 and 2000 quoted and unquoted hotel chains grew room stock by 59 per cent, adding a net average of 5300 rooms per year. They now account for 56 per cent of UK hotel rooms and the growth is continuing (Slattery and Roper, 1986; Hotel and Catering Research Centre, 2001). Consolidation is Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism Education 1(1), 19-28 24 Slattery, P. 2002) Finding the Hospitality Industry occurring throughout the range of hospitality businesses and is the most significant long-term development in the structure of the industry.

It is also a trend that is gathering pace, driven by the greater efficiency of chains over unaffiliated venues, the greater capital access of chains and their capacity to offer careers to graduates rather than the operational jobs, which are the limit of unaffiliated venues. Our analysis at DrKW shows that by 2030 the number of hotel rooms in the world will double to around 30 million and that the room stock of hotel chains will increase from 4. million to 20 million, while the number of unaffiliated hotel rooms will not grow and quasi hotels will continue to decline (Slattery, 1999). When the unit of analysis is the hospitality chain, then the corporate management of the business becomes central and an array of priorities emerge such as the performance of the chain and the conception and management of hospitality brands, which have no part to play in the social and private domains. Two other examples illustrate the divergence.

First, corporate executives manage hospitality portfolios and this involves chain supply management. There are eight chain supply variables with which they juggle: market level profile, configuration of facilities profile, size of venue profile, affiliation profile, chain length profile, chain size profile, country profile and city profile. The active portfolio management of hospitality chains is necessary to optimise the supply profile of the portfolio, to capture the developments in demand and to optimise medium to long-term growth in shareholder value. Secondly, hospitality chains are either involved themselves or outsource a range of services that include: suppliers, lenders, investors, investment banks, property developers, management consultants and demand processors such as travel agents, tour operators, global distribution systems and internet companies such as Lastminute and Travelocity. There is no reference in the book to the corporate context of the hospitality business and there is no evidence that the three-domainers recognise the centrality of the corporate context to the understanding of the hospitality industry. The corporate context has no parallel in the social or private domains, and the more attention that is given to its realities, the less relevant is the three-domain approach.

The venue context Within the hospitality industry all hospitality events occur in specific venues while the diversity of supply profile of the venues creates the conditions for a diversity of hospitality experiences. There are two features that constrain the three-domainers’ understanding of hospitality venues; the first is their insistence that hospitality is about providing accommodation, food and drink. This locks them into a minimalist conception of hospitality based on subsistence and entails that customers primarily are motivated by tiredness, hunger and thirst. Hospitality customers not only buy products, but also facilities and services. A restaurant purchases food, which it prepares and cooks; it serves meals to customers who consume them on site. The prices charged reflect the investment in the real estate, the kitchen equipment, the chefs, the waiters and the other staff, the tables, chairs, crockery, cutlery, glassware and napery as well as the ambience created by the use of light, sound, colours, artefacts and design and also the form of service. The task for the restaurant is to identify the specific demand of the customers at any time, to organise the technology and processes to deliver the products, facilities and services so that customers achieve their aims in the restaurant. To reduce the restaurant experience from meals to food and drink devalues the hospitality input and detracts from the rationale for the prices charged for a meal eaten in a restaurant compared with the much lower prices charged for the same food and drink items when bought in a supermarket.

The second constraint follows from this and concerns the confusion of the hospitality business with retailing. Like retailers, hospitality venues are part of the distribution channel for food and drink, but there are two necessary conditions for hospitality venues, which distinguish them from retailers. First, and crucially, hospitality customers consume within the venue. Retail customers buy products in the shop and consume them elsewhere, on their own terms and without any involvement from the retailer. Hospitality managers are centrally involved in the creation of the context of consumption and the Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism Education 1(1), 19-28 25 Slattery, P. (2002) Finding the Hospitality Industry management of consumption, both of which are absent from the activities of retailers.

Some restaurants sell take-away meals, which inherently is a retail operation. The decision to include takeaway as an ancillary service within a restaurant is strategic, depending on the size of demand and how effectively it can be met by the restaurant. It is a minority activity to the prime hospitality activities. The three-domainers are not alone in confusing hospitality and retailing. By the start of the twentieth century UK brewing companies had evolved into vertically integrated businesses based around the production of beer, the distribution of beer to pubs as well as the operation of pubs and the pub tenancy system. The vertically integrated structure was based on the classic economic structure of producer, wholesaler and retailer. Brewing was the primary activity in the hierarchy, pubs were reduced to a cost centre rather than a profit centre and over time came to be regarded by the brewers as retailers.

However, the objective reality is that pubs are not retail outlets. They are hospitality venues, which meet the necessary conditions that their dominant market is on-site consumption and that customers purchase not only the products, but also facilities and services. In contrast, off-licences are regulated to sell alcoholic beverages only in sealed containers for consumption off-site. They are shops and are not hospitality businesses. Those who conceive of pubs as retail outlets avoid the distinction between on-licences and off-licences and constrain their understanding of the hospitality experiences in pubs. The brewers’ conception of the pub was a contributing factor in their failure to see the relevance or attraction of the major UK growth, from the 1970s, of all other hospitality businesses (The Monopolies and Mergers Commission, 1989). Beer was a minority demand in the new on-licences so the brewers showed little interest. No type of hospitality venue in the world has been conceived of as a retail outlet more than the British pub.

No hospitality venue other than the British pub has been vertically integrated with a producer of a single product, beer and no hospitality business throughout the twentieth century declined in numbers as much as the British pub. There is a consistency in the three-domainers’ position of identifying the hospitality venue as providing accommodation, food and drink and conceiving of it as a retailer. Indeed, one of the editors and the prime mover in the three-domain approach is a ‘ Professor in Licensed Retail Management’. Licensed retail management, accurately, is off-licence management. Paradoxically, this business falls outside of the scope of Brotherton and Wood’s definition of hospitality and the hospitality industry and no hospitality company operates a free-standing off-licence business. The hospitality experience is not only determined by the supply profiles of venues. It is also influenced by the degree to which the customer is able to choose a hospitality venue.

Typically, customers in free-standing hospitality venues such as hotels, restaurants and bars are less rather than more captive because they have the opportunity to select the venue they want to visit. They have choices of products, facilities and services to buy and a choice of prices to pay. In contrast, customers in subsidised hospitality venues such as workplace, health care and education catering are more rather than less captive since they have fewer options of venue to select, fewer choices of products, facilities and services to buy, and in some instances payment is not made at source. The more captive the customer, the more the hospitality is focused on subsistence. The less captive, the more the hospitality is to do with enjoyment. Add to this the catalogue of reasons why customers visit hospitality venues and the array of values about what constitutes a satisfying hospitality experience and the need is for a conception of hospitality able to account for the diversity of hospitality venues and the diversity of the customer experience therein, rather than the constraining uniformity of the three-domainers. ConclusionsThe three-domainers seek understanding of the hospitality industry in the social domain, the private domain, their version of the commercial domain and even the retail industry, anywhere except in the Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism Education 1(1), 19-28 26 Slattery, P.

(2002) Finding the Hospitality Industry industry itself. De facto the hospitality industry is not in the private domain and it is not a retailer. Their version of the commercial domain is woeful and it is not clear from the book if and how the social domain exists in discrete venues. By focusing only on the process of exchange in hospitality the three-domainers exclude the industrial and corporate contexts of hospitality and the diversity of venue contexts. Consequently, they have produced a sterile conception of hospitality and a radically inaccurate conception of the hospitality industry. To exclude context is untenable. To include context renders the position of the threedomainers redundant. If the three-domain approach to hospitality and the hospitality industry is redundant, then it is also a redundant basis for hospitality management teaching and research.

Their approach blurs the distinction between hospitality management and home economics. We do not need an approach that confuses Bill Marriott with Martha Stewart and David Michels with Delia Smith. The more that hospitality management academics focus on the range and structure of the hospitality business and on how they can solve problems within its contexts, the less they will be distracted by the aberration of the three-domain approach. They will then be better able to prepare graduates with more effective conceptual understandings of the industry and to focus on research activities that contribute to the development of the industry. The contributors to the three-domain approach from outside of the hospitality management field are blind to the essential features of the hospitality industry. They may be forgiven for that. The hospitality management academics who conceived and promote the three-domain approach should have known better.

Their search for hospitality is a case of the blind leading the blind. Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism Education 1(1), 19-28 27 Slattery, P. (2002) Finding the Hospitality Industry References Allin, P. (1999) Is the UK hotel sector out of trouble? The International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management 11(7), 318-325. Brotherton, B. (1999) Towards a definitive view of the nature of hospitality and hospitality management. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management 11(2), 165-17.

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