Hospitality Industry



Hospitality Industry

Introduction

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. This paper will have an analysis of the current and future structure of the UK hospitality industry, and an evaluation of industry performance using a range of tools.

Discussion

Current Structure Of The Hospitality Industry

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 fabulously 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 , 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 ...