Hospitality management studies

Hospitality management studies (HMS) is the study of the hospitality industry and the industry-specific issues that arise for managers and owners of restaurants, hotels, convention centers, and other venues within the travel and tourism industry. Colleges, universities, and business schools offering HMS degree programs may also refer to the field as hospitality administration, hotel administration, hotel management, or tourism management. These tend to be older names for the field, which is not limited to hotel management but includes cruise lines, amusement parks, and other elements of the tourism industry, such as transportation providers, travel agencies, and organized tours. HMS curricula often cover event planning, marketing, business administration, human resources management, food and beverage management, managerial accounting, finance, and revenue management.

Notable university HMS programs include Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, the first undergraduate HMS degree program in the world; the École Hôtelière de Lausanne and the Glion Institute of Higher Education in Switzerland, which are consistently ranked as the most well-respected HMS programs in the world; and the Hotelschool the Hague in the Netherlands.

Background

Though Cornell established the first program to offer undergraduate degrees in HMS in 1922, the École Hôtelière de Lausanne, founded in 1893 as the École Professionnelle de la Société Suisse des Hôteliers, was the world’s first trade school to focus on hospitality studies. Its founding marked a time when, although positions in the domestic service trades such as butlers were in sharp decline as the great houses of European aristocrats reduced the sizes of their staff, the precipitous growth of the middle class contributed to making the hospitality industry newly important. Furthermore, advances in transportation—notably the steamship and the railroad—had changed the nature of leisure travel, while urbanization, technological advances, and societal changes had created the modern restaurant industry.

When the École Hôtelière de Lausanne opened, hospitality was thus a relatively new field. Inns and hotels offering more than the basic amenities had been common for only about a century and a half. While there had always been facilities of some kind offering travelers a place to stay, a steady supply of sufficiently wealthy customers was required to justify the existence of hotels with truly comfortable accommodations and amenities beyond the simple provision of a place to sleep and a stable for horses. Specific destinations that drew travelers could depend on such a supply, but in general the modern sense of the hotel did not develop until around the end of the eighteenth century.

The same was true of restaurants, with most historians agreeing that the first modern restaurant in the West was opened in Paris (where the term was coined) in the late eighteenth century. Restaurants spread in response to numerous factors, principally urbanization, which provided them with a steady stream of customers, many of whom were young men who—unlike the men of previous generations—were less likely to live with wives, mothers, or grandmothers who cooked for them. In the United States, for instance, restaurants were initially more common in the American West, where the population on the frontier was overwhelmingly male, than in the more settled East.

Overview

The hospitality field depends, at base, on a steady supply of customers with both leisure time and disposable income. Although there are elements of the industry that cater to business clientele rather than the general public—such as convention centers and organizers—these still depend on businesses spending money on nonessential services. Furthermore, the business model of these convention centers and other services usually depends on attendees who spend money independent of whatever fees have been paid by their employer to host the event itself. This makes the hospitality industry especially vulnerable to overall economic downturns. The hotels and motels industry is especially concerned with vacancy rates (the proportion of rooms that go unused), while the restaurant industry similarly focuses on analogous measures of empty tables, unsold seats, and so forth. Filling as many of these empty spaces as possible is one of the goals of hospitality management.

The hospitality industry includes numerous fields, not only hotels, resorts, and other lodging, but amusement parks and similar attractions; restaurants, bars, and nightclubs; cruises, travel agencies, and tours; and event planning, convention centers, and convention organizing. A wide variety of services and employees are involved in the industry, some of whom are employed full or part time, others who are independent contractors. There are several industries with which the hospitality industry works closely, such as professional sports and entertainment, the transportation industry and local mass transit, the gaming industry, and others. Overseeing these many elements is the fundamental purpose of management.

HMS is not just for managers. Many graduates of HMS programs go into strategic marketing, public relations, and sales-related work in the hospitality industry. In addition to courses on the hospitality industry overall, HMS curricula often include coursework on business management, accounting, food and beverage management or preparation, food safety, world cultures, foreign languages, resort management, convention management, managerial accounting, information technology, marketing, human resources, strategic planning, business law, and event planning. Some HMS programs specialize in specific areas; for instance, the University of Nevada’s William F. Harrah College of Hotel Administration, because of its location in Las Vegas, is able to offer concentrations in gaming management as well as in meetings and events, restaurant management, and professional golf management.

HMS graduate programs usually expect students to study a specific area of concentration related to the hospitality field in which they plan to pursue a career (in nearly all cases, this is a field in which they have already completed some work experience or an internship). Dual-degree programs are also common, especially at the graduate level; the most typical is a master of science in hospitality management and master of business administration.

Bibliography

Fenich, George G. Meetings, Expositions, Events, and Conventions. Boston: Pearson, 2015.

Ford, Robert C., Michael C. Sturman, and Cherrill P. Heaton. Managing Quality Service in Hospitality. Boston: Cengage, 2011.

Fyall, Alan, Patrick Legoherel, and Elisabeth Poutier. Revenue Management for Hospitality and Tourism. Woodeaton: Goodfellow, 2013.

Guidara, Will. Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect. Optimism Press, 2022.

Kayes, David K., and Jack D. Ninemeier. Human Resources Management in the Hospitality Industry. New York: Wiley, 2015.

Kotler, Philip T., John T. Bowen, and James Makens. Marketing for Hospitality and Tourism. Boston: Pearson, 2013.

Sturman, Michael C. The Cornell School of Hotel Administration on Hospitality: Cutting Edge Thinking and Practice. New York: Wiley, 2011.

Van der Wagen, Lynn. Hospitality Management, Strategy, and Operations. Boston: Pearson, 2015.

Walker, John R. Introduction to Hospitality. Boston: Pearson, 2016.