The Effect of Global Trends on The Development of The Hospitality and Tourism Industry Now and in The Future

Hotels, with the most crucial objective to provide customers with a feeling of home by offering quality services and products. To achieve this goal, we firstly need a bunch of productive, qualified and satisfied employees to manage the hotels and produce all these. However, in the 21st century, having only talented workers is definitely insufficient for a hotel to survive in an industry with a considerable amount of innovative hotels. The generation is changing so as the hotels, there are plenty of trends appearing in the hospitality industry which have intensified the competition within the industry, leading to a significant drop in the room occupancy rate of some infamous hotels. Even in the worst case, some hotels and motels are being phased out. Although following closely with the hottest trends is undoubtedly helping the hotels to attract customers from competitors and matching to customers’ needs, it will incur numerous expenses and other addition side effects. In the essay below, three global trends or issues will be identified and analysed with the supports of relevant scholarly literatures, in order to show how these recent trends affect the development of the hospitality and tourism industry now and in the future.

In fact, most of the industries including the hospitality industry are eager to have a combination of employees with different nationalities, educational backgrounds, ages and so on, as it is a good way to collect new insights for companies’ development. Therefore, the first trend that will be discussed is diversity management. “Diversity management refers to organizational actions that aim to promote greater inclusion of employees from different backgrounds into an organisation’s structure through specific policies and programs. ” Globalisation facilitates the flow of labours resulting in the growing diversity of labour force globally. To be a caring and socially responsible industry, the hotel industry will be willing to accept a certain number of diverse workforce, such as the minorities, the less educated or even the disabled. This could be one of the factors why hotels nowadays start to recruit various kinds of applicants. Another one may because of the blossom of tourism industry, more and more people from different countries love to travel and explore other places, causing the needs of diverse employees to provide expertise on their own cultures and how to serve the customers correspondingly. A fairly obvious positive impact of this is that new skills, insights and innovations can be brought to the hotels. “Diversity in work force contributed to organizational flexibility, innovation, creativity, problem solving, and decision making. ”

Take Japan as an example, as Japan has become a popular tourist spot to Chinese travellers, if a hotel hires a few front officers who are native Chinese speakers, then requests and complaints from Chinese travellers can be quickly solved or products can be easily be promoted to them as there is no language barrier in between. In the hospitality industry, we always insist the importance of one’s international exposure. But if the industry hire foreign workforce than local labour, it can reduce the time to train the language skills or insights that they have already acquired, and it also help to reduce the cost as time is money, which these money can be invest in other aspects like renovations to upgrade the hotels. Besides, with the application of cultural diversity, new markets can be found. For instance, to employ professional Chinese chefs in hotels located in the UK, to offer Chinese cuisine, this could attract a large number of Chinese tourists as it is hard to find Chinese restaurants there and it can give a genial feeling to the tourists. In today, adopting diversity management in a hotel is a competitive advantage over those do not have, however, if the trend keeps going on and more hotels try to merge more sorts of cultures into the design or operation of it, will the cultural heterogeneity of disparate regions be hindered in the industry future?

Perhaps, it is more like a threat to the industry and there is a need to strike a balance in between. On the other hand, diversity management is not a good thing as it may lead to discrimination issue in recruitment process or in workplace, especially when there are employees from less privileged countries like Indonesia. If discrimination issue exists in the hospitality industry, clients will be unsatisfied with the hotels due to the unfriendliness of it and less and less people patronize hotels services. Fortunately, “About 71 per cent of the managers said that they took care to ensure that there was no discrimination in the selection of candidates”, but here comes another problem that promoting anti-discrimination could at the same time emphasize the cultural differences which may make the non-native workers feel uncomfortable. Thus, more efforts should be put on appreciating and valuing the uniqueness of cultures instead of just tolerating and accepting them. The second trend in hospitality industry is the most common one, but it could be genuinely creative and interesting depends on how the hotels are going to utilise it — the emergence of technology. Nowadays, people are more interested in high-tech devices and more rely on them. A simple example can prove it, people prefer to use Apple Pay, Android Pay etc. to make their payments than to use cash or credit cards. This manifests that customers seek for a fast and convenient service experience, thereby, firms which can fulfil this could enhance customers satisfaction and retain customers. Similar to the hospitality industry, “With an increase in the prominence of services, emphasis has shifted from product development towards service development. ”

An elevating number of facilities are used to replace simple tasks, such as check-in and check-out services. The most commonly used technology is self-service technology, in the form of Apps, websites and machines. For instance, using Trivago App for acquisition of hotels information and bookings, entering official website of the Peninsula hotel for its well-known mooncakes purchase. A more advanced technology is even invented and used in Hilton Hotels, that customers are able to enter the room with a digital key from the Hilton Honors app. With the implication of new technology, hotels products or sales can be promoted through more different channels and message can be spread instantly and wider, as most people own at least a mobile phone and message can be easily reach to them. Apparently, via technology, potential customers can be attracted and interested customers can look for more details and purchase goods online 24 hours a day without any geographical constraints. Thus, the hotels’ revenue can be raised because clients who are lazy or busy to go out for shopping can easily get their desire products on the internet. Specifically, hotels in less developed countries are benefited with the help of technology since their literacy rate is low, hotels are lack of workforce, thus, high-tech equipment can help them to heighten productivity. Moreover, technology gives hotel customers more freedom and convenience throughout the trip which can further boost the customers satisfaction. Try to imagine, if a customer use the self-service kiosk to check-in, he could save a lot of time as lining up or operational delays happen rarely.

A promising service experience will leave an unforgettable memory to the customers that they will still choose the same hotel in the next trips. Therefore, applying technology in the industry is inducive in building customers loyalty which generate more business opportunities, that is hotels will have a record of frequent customers, by knowing their purchase history, the hotels can do cross-selling or up-selling to earn more. Technology could be a supporter to the hospitality industry, at the same time it will lead to the distortion of the aim of hospitality business. Over-reliance on technology will reduce the human interactions between the hotels and customers, like feedback is collected via webpage, emotions and feelings are missing that everything will become very mechanized and rigid. Thus, the original goal of offering warm and welcomed service will diminish. In addition, many people comment that the use of technology will replace the labour force in hospitality industry leading to a significant number of unemployment, but this depends on how operation directors utilise it, and actually technology could help to solve today’s problem of lack of workers in room, laundry and all cleaning services. Apart from the two trends that have mentioned above, there is also a main concern to the growth of hospitality industry at the moment, that is the appearance of a sharing economy platform — Airbnb. It provides data of thousands of departments for users to refer to, and enables the users to choose the most favourite one and make their reservations through the platform. “Airbnb offers a much wider range of products and services than hotels. ” This is one of the major causes that is why Airbnb becomes so popular, especially within the younger generation as the design of rooms are special, some are simple, some are vintage style, some are with cartoon themes or some even equip with a swimming pool, while prices are low and affordable. No wonder this could be a threat to the hospitality industry in short-term as the younger generation focus more on the experience living in a spacy and well-designed house with friends over the service quality that offered by a brandy hotels. Slowly, Airbnb may substitute hotels. Therefore, the prevalence of Airbnb makes the whole hospitality industry less appealing to its past customers which may possibly lead to the decline of the industry. As I have indicated above, users can enjoy a lower price for an accommodation, this directly influences the price of hotels. Despite of this, the influence is just a minor problem, hospitality can take the advantage of price difference to showcase their professional service quality to attract other market segments, such as families and businessmen. Even though Airbnb gives quite a lot of benefits to the customers, but those are somehow superficial and act like gimmicks to attract customers. The hidden safety problem of it is recently rising and even laws are legislated in some countries to deal with the issue. Incidents in recent years have heightened the concern of tourists, for example, a Korean guest was being sexually assaulted by a Japanese host and few female visitors had found hidden cameras in bathroom and fire detector.

These are only a tiny part of the incident that there are certainly more alike cases occurring in the globe and users from all over the world will be affected as they lose confidence in the application. Many travellers were frightened after reading the news and cancelled their bookings. In comparison, hotels are comparatively more secure than Airbnb due to reliable facilities and well-trained staff that safety can be ensured. With the strike to Airbnb, the values of hospitality industry are elevated and the growth of it could be further enhanced as customers will perceive safety and security as a more critical criteria when deciding whether to stay in a hotel or Airbnb. In conclusion, Airbnb is a double-edged sword that it could harm or benefit the development of hospitality industry, or sometimes it only slightly affect the industry.

To sum up, the growth of hospitality industry could be influenced by hundreds of global issues, the impacts could be mild, could be harsh, could be positive or negative. In the above, the affection of diversity management, emergence of technology and booming of Airbnb are chiefly discussed. Sometimes a negative impact can frankly point out the defects of the industry, which allows the industry to think of a stronger solution to compete with others, at the same time a brand new market opportunity may appear. In my opinion, a sustainable development of hospitality industry is not only about responding to the trends, but also to create our precious values so as to differentiate us from other industries. Nevertheless, we have to always keep the industry main goal in our mind, because we make changes but changes should not change us.