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Gen Z, the largest and fastest-growing consumer generation, is transforming the hospitality industry as both customers and employees. By critically synthesizing empirical literature, this study aims to explore how this generation’s distinct behaviors are reshaping customer expectations and workforce trends within the sector.

A critical synthesis of empirical studies was used to examine current research on Gen Z as customers and employees in the hospitality industry.

Gen Z exhibits distinct preferences and expectations in their dual roles as customers and employees, prompting substantial shifts in hospitality industry standards and practices. They rely heavily on digital channels and peer recommendations when making travel decisions and expect highly personalized, tech-enabled experiences. This young cohort of travelers values unique, authentic and sustainable offerings. As employees, Gen Z prioritizes flexible work arrangements, career growth and workplaces aligned with sustainability, diversity and social responsibility. Hospitality providers must adapt their customer experience, marketing and HR strategies to meet these evolving demands.

To engage Gen Z customers and employees in the hospitality industry effectively, businesses must prioritize personalized experiences, leverage technology and adopt sustainable practices aligned with Gen Z’s social and environmental values. Moreover, offering adaptable work environments with remote opportunities and investing in professional development enhances appeal for Gen Z employees. Understanding Gen Z’s values and behaviors can help businesses improve customer satisfaction, attract top talent and remain competitive in a rapidly evolving market.

This study represents a preliminary endeavor to provide a critical assessment of Gen Z in the hospitality and tourism sector, offering novel insights into their travel behaviors, preferences and work values. It explores their expectations, attitudes toward work and career choices, offering guidance on how businesses can meet the evolving demands of this key demographic.

With the continued rise of digital marketing, the opportunity for the hospitality industry to re-imagine and re-design processes and systems to create a seamless customer journey has never been bigger.

In this chapter, the authors look at how customer experience drives innovation and how our changing values, precipitated by social, economic and behavioural flux, mean that hospitality and tourism brands are creating new systems and processes.

The COVID-19 pandemic saw an influx of technology solutions that offered the service industry a multitude of platforms to capture the public's attention to drive both profit and guest experience. The authors have found that the pandemic accelerated trends, and customers have now become increasingly accustomed to instantaneous service. This chapter explores how technology has been leveraged to meet this behaviour and the guest expectations associated with it.

The authors have interviewed four hospitality leaders from various sectors of the hospitality industry to help identify and analyse customer and employee trends. These leaders included: Florence Alloing – Group General Manager at Georgian House in London; David Gardner – Managing Partner at 80 Days; Rob Flinter – General Manager of Park Plaza Waterloo in London and Andrea Shaw – Director at FM Recruitment. Each interviewee was presented with a questionnaire to explore their experiences regarding customer experience, guest expectations, technological advancement, recruitment and organisational values. The authors used a thematic method to identify trends and have presented these findings to support the article. All quotes from these interviews will be referenced (Donald & Donald, 2023).

The purpose of this study is to investigate how the implementation of digital banking services (mobile applications) by globally systemically important banks (G-SIBs) affects banks’ performance in the USA and Europe from 2005 to 2022.

The study employs advanced econometric methods to analyze the link between deposits and banking performance, utilizing linear regressions and multivariate Bayesian regressions.

Our results indicate that customer deposits positively impact a bank’s performance after the introduction of the mobile application feature of check deposits, whereas social risk negatively impacts banking financial performance. These findings support the hypothesis that technology implementation improves the profitability and growth of traditional banks.

While findings are robust econometrically in linear and Bayesian regressions, variables reflecting the digitalization of banks remain limited. For instance, the number of mobile users or the volume of digital transactions per bank since the implementation of the mobile app is not available.

In a rapidly growing technology and constantly changing customers behaviors, this research has practical implications from bankers’ perspective to continue the technological innovation efforts and from regulators’ perspective to strengthen requirements for the digital banking services.

We provide empirical evidence that including a banking app for smartphones’ users for remote banking services benefit the financial performance of banks. However, the social risk remains significant for banks in terms of customers' satisfaction, data privacy and cybersecurity.

This paper employs an innovative approach to create a mobile app “discriminatory” factor and examine the relationship between deposits and banks’ performance before and after the introduction of a mobile app for too-big-to-fail banks in Europe and the USA. Additionally, we consider the social risk component of the ESG score, as a bank’s decision to implement mobile applications and technology for its customers potentially affects social risks associated with customer satisfaction and technology usability.

The purpose of this study is to establish the relationship between digital leadership and academic performance. It models the digitalization process, outlining why and how digital leadership is important for better academic performance. At the same time, this study examines the role of digital culture as a moderating variable in the direct relationship between main variables of the study. The study aims to expand the domain of academic performance at the university by including a much recent leadership-related aspect and organizational context of the digital culture.

The study opted for a descriptive study, using the survey instruments to collect the data. The sample population consisted of students currently enrolled at the Faculty of Business and Management, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Melaka, Malaysia. Based on the convenience sampling, 383 samples were drawn from the sample population. All items were adopted from previous literature, and expert feedback was obtained to examine the validity of the instruments. The data were analysed using SPSS and SmartPLS version 3.0.

This study provides empirical insights about how digital leadership is important for academic performance for the new millennials. Also, digital culture is found to provide significant moderation effect into the relationship. It suggests that universities must promote digitalization culture and embed the use of technology and digitalization into teaching and learning to cultivate a more effective learning process among university students. This is important as elements of digital leadership, including adaptive role, attitude, digital competency, digital skill and inspirational role, are found to significantly contribute to academic performance.

This study only focuses on samples taken from one of the faculties in one campus, thus limiting its scope. Future research is encouraged to replicate the same study setting to include larger sample size from different faculties, or perhaps from different universities. These propositions could help to better generalize the research findings on the practice of digital leadership on academic performance in the country. However, this study established a digital leadership model that can be applied to undergraduate students at the universities. Also, the inclusion of digital culture can strengthen the learning process.

This study includes implications for the development of digital leadership attributes and promoting digital culture within the university students and environment for engaging in a better academic performance. Digital leadership is found to be an important criterion of academic performance in this digital age society, and cultivating digital culture enhances students’ academic performance. These findings shall prompt the university to actively engage in fostering digitalization culture within the university. Also, the top management of the university should inform the students to be adaptive and cultivate the attributes of digital leaders, as their readiness to cope with the technological change has significant positive impact on their academic performance.

It is important to ensure that the future graduates that are being produced are ready to take on more challenges as digital leaders in the digital society. This might accelerate the country’s initiatives and efforts towards becoming a developed nation. Thus, investing in oneself to become digitally literate and competent might not only influence their academic performance, but they will also be equipped to fulfil one of the expectations of future employers of potential graduates, which is possessing digital leadership.

Digitalization is not only about the technology. It is about the people too. As the study on digital leadership is still in its infant stage, this study is unique as it is among the earliest to establish digital leadership constructs within the context of Malaysia. It informs the university that digital leadership provides significant contribution to academic performance. Thus, the university is encouraged to nurture digitalization, not only in the teaching and learning but also with the people within the university environment. Determining the right programs and plans for the curricular will help students to develop digital leadership attributes more effectively. Finally, improving digitalization among its students and culture is important, as these elements provide significant effect towards academic performance.

This chapter examines mobile payments and digital banking services. The past decade has seen a rapid increase in the use of alternative payment systems, away from cash to electronic payments. The digitalization of payments includes business-to-business (B2B), customer-to-business (C2B), and government-to-business and consumers (G2B/C), whether the payments are by computer, wire transfers, and point of sale (POS) systems. POS systems have become a standard in many retail outlets. Mobile payments use a smart device for contactless pay. Consumers see the increasing prevalence of payment systems when they go to the retail checkout or service counter. Worldwide, mobile payments are approaching 50% of digital. Digitalized payment systems are becoming more secure, decreasing concerns over mistaken payments, fraud, and errors. Consumers' confidence in value and usage decreases with age. Most fraud is due to scams and not hacking. Greater access to improved infrastructure and affordable smart devices will expand the usage of digitalized payment systems worldwide.

To extend research into sport consumer behaviors related to online sports betting, this study is designed to identify and examine the relationship between online sports betting motivations and online sports betting intentions. By applying a push-pull framework from online sport consumption and gambling studies, nine motivations to engage in online sports betting were identified. These motivations were hypothesized to motivate online sports betting intentions.

A quota sampling technique based on the sports bettor demographics available in the American Gaming Association (AGA, 2019) and the Pew Research Center (2022) obtained a total of 550 completed surveys that met the inclusion and exclusion criteria. For data analyses, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM) were used to examine the measurement model and the hypothesized model, respectively.

The results revealed that four motivations (i.e. monetary gain, excitement, convenience and negative technology-readiness) were related to online sports betting intention, while five motivations (i.e. sport fandom, positive technology-readiness, impulsivity, socialization and promotion) were not.

The results provide foundational theoretical knowledge of what motivates sports fans to participate in online sports betting. Furthermore, the findings assist practitioners in their allocation of resources by enhancing their understanding of online sports betting motivations.

This chapter introduces what a digital ID is, why it is important, how it works, the design choices, as well as how central banks can collaborate with other stakeholders in promoting digital ID infrastructures for use in digital financial services.

Digital technology (DT) is a massive and robust tool for organizational success. This paper aims to examine the roles of digitalization and digital innovation (DI) in developing the capability of a digital economy.

The authors used a cross-sectional study to collect the data from the managers of Egyptian SME manufacturing firms. This study utilized 322 samples.

From applying the structural equation model (SEM), this study’s findings show that digital capability (DC) and digital orientation (DO) exert a positive effect on the firm’s digital economy capability (DEC). In addition, DC has a positive impact on DI. In contrast, digital technology self-efficacy (DTSE) negatively predicts DEC. This study’s results also confirm DO’s negative effect on DI. The DTSE is a positive enabler of DI that has also positively affected the DEC. The mediating results demonstrate that DI reinforces the positive connection between DO and DEC. On the other hand, DI does not mediate the connection between DO and DEC and between DTSE and DEC.

This study’s outcomes support policymakers and manufacturing organizations in employing DT to improve DEC and, thereby, develop firm performance and success. The study’s findings also encourage organizations to invest in bringing about a digital culture within them. Finally, by developing DT and DI, firms can nurture a conducive culture of creativity and forward-thinking.

This study directly overcomes the need for an integrated framework of all DI, DTSE, DO, DC and DEC. Furthermore, DI’s mediating contribution between DC and DEC, between DO and DEC and between DTSE and DEC adds fresh insights to the existing literature.

This chapter reviews new technologies, new types of players and new types of financial products that together are fundamentally affecting supply and demand dynamics in the financial sector and contributing to the emerging digital financial landscape. The aim of this chapter is to set a common understanding on the underlying forces of digital disruption in the financial sector before exploring the challenges to monetary and financial stability that are arising. In later chapters, the book will examine how central banks might deal with the challenges and help shape the emerging digital financial landscape.

The chapter explores the implications of digitalization on the informal economy of Ghana, focusing on the agricultural, microcredit, transportation, and retail sectors. The study was designed as a qualitative study with data collected from books, articles, government reports, business reports, and newspapers. The data collected were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. The study argues that in the agricultural sector, e-agriculture initiatives and digital tools have improved farming practices, providing timely scientific knowledge to farmers and increasing yields. The microcredit sector has been transformed through digital financial services, which have expanded financial inclusion, lowered costs, and simplified regulatory compliance. In the transportation sector, digital platforms like Uber and local startups have streamlined operations, improved safety, and created economic opportunities for drivers. Additionally, e-commerce platforms have facilitated stock ordering and delivery for retailers, reducing downtime and formalizing their transactions. These digital innovations are crucial in enhancing the formalization of the informal economy in Ghana, providing numerous benefits for businesses and individuals in these sectors.