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This paper explores how hospitality frontline employees understand, interpret and practice “hospitality” in a hotel industry context.

Framed by interpretivist and phenomenological approaches a dual-stage semi-structured interview study design was conducted. A sample was drawn from hotel employees in Australia.

Findings support the proposition that the hospitality workforce tends to favor service management and service processes as the guiding paradigm. The essence of what it means to be hospitable, and the host-guest model, appears to be largely absent in practice.

This paper contributes to a scarcity of literature exploring the understanding of hospitality, and how this understanding can translate into hospitable behavior, from the employee perspective. Our main implication is that service management terminology colonizes hospitality within a commercial context, while the essence of hospitality and the “hospitality” lexicon is concomitantly diminishing. The authors advocate for developing an inter-paradigmatic view of hospitality management.

While the study revealed that the majority of frontline hotel employees struggle with grasping and verbalizing their understandings and perceptions of the hospitality construct, although some acknowledged the importance of hospitality as being an integral component to service delivery. We identified consistent organizational practices and intrinsic employee traits that either enabled or obstructed hospitable behavior in hotel settings.

The study reveals tensions between the hospitality and service paradigms in hospitality literature and practice. We uncover hotel management practices that may help to conserve and foster the essence of hospitality in hospitality organizations.

With the ever-increasing adoption of technology and automation radically changing the nature of service delivery, the purpose of this paper is to explore the role of human touch, introducing hospitable service as an enhancement for value creation in service organizations.

Drawing on management, social sciences and hospitality literatures, a four-configuration model is presented to illustrate dimensions which arise from the confluence of different degrees of relationship orientation – shared mental models held by the host organization (self- or other-oriented), and guests’ service preferences (transactional or relational).

A theoretically grounded model of configurations resulting from variations on three key dimensions is offered. These are: employee organization relationships – social exchange processes governing the interactions between employees and their employers; HRM systems – internally consistent combinations of HR practices; and tech-touch trade-off – prioritization of technology vs employees to deliver services.

Embedding hospitable service as a construct to support the leveraging of human touch in service organizations opens up new research opportunities including avenues to further conceptualize the nature and dimensions of hospitable service. Future research that supports further understanding about the role of human touch and value creation in service organizations is proposed.

Through the value-enhancing capability of human in the service encounter, firms can be enabled to accurately position themselves in one of the four relational configurations on offer and then identify opportunities for managers to leverage human touch to combat the diminishing role of the human touch in a technology-ubiquitous service context.

This is among the first papers to explore the influence of technology on the degree of human touch in the interface between hospitality employee and customer, and to develop a configuration model through which researchers and practitioners can operate during this declining era of human to human service interactions.

The overarching goal of this paper is to increase awareness among researchers and practitioners that refugees are disproportionally impacted by COVID-19, which increases their suffering. Second, it extends a recently introduced transformative refugee service experience framework by integrating and conceptualizing refugees' resource and service inclusion during a pandemic. Third, it explores lessons learned and implications from the COVID-19 pandemic for the future of service research and practice.

This study synthesizes approaches on refugees, resources and transformative service research to develop an extended framework for addressing one of society's pressing issues during and after pandemics.

Recognizing refugees as providing resources rather than just needing or depleting resources can enable more inclusion. It facilitates refugees' integration into society by drawing on their skills and knowledge. This requires hospitable refugee service systems that enable service inclusion and opportunities for refugee resource integration.

This article focuses on one vulnerable group in society. However, the extended framework presented warrants broader application to other contexts, such as subsistence marketplaces.

Managers of service businesses and public policymakers should create more inclusive and hospitable service systems for refugees. This may result in redesigning services, changing consumer behavior and reformulating public policy.

Better inclusion and integration of refugees and their resources should increase their individual well-being, reduce social issues in society, increase overall societal well-being and productivity.

This article presents a novel extended framework for service scholars and service providers to increase resource and service inclusion of refugees in a disaster context.

This study aims to extract determinants of customers' choice of dining-related services (CDS) to understand their attitudes and habits for dining-related services. Moreover, it classifies restaurant customers into several clusters based on their CDS factors and further analyzes the differences in the preferences and habits for dining-related services among various clusters.

This study extracts the CDS factors using principal component analysis and identifies construct validity of the CDS factors through the results of confirmatory factor analysis. Then, it divides the restaurant customers in Taipei City into different clusters through cluster analysis to explore the habits and preferences for dining-related services in each cluster.

The study results show that the extracted six CDS factors, including service commitment, dietary preferences, design styles, additional value, delicate information collection, and dining environments. Dietary preferences, service commitment and additional value factor are the most important CDS factors for restaurant customers in Taipei City. This study divides 1,029 restaurant customers in Taipei City into three clusters based on the CDS factors through cluster analysis. The differences in the preferences and habits for dining services among three clusters have been discussed in the context in detail. Finally, this study develops eight service strategies and determines the order of execution of the eight service strategies for each cluster of customers.

The findings will help restaurant operators segment the market, target market customers, carry out service positioning and develop marketing strategies to respond to the highly competitive restaurant market and achieve sustainable restaurant operations.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between restaurant key attributes, customer satisfaction and behavioral intentions. The mediating role of customer satisfaction is assessed between restaurants’ key attributes of service quality and behavioral intentions.

Data were collected from a sample of 296 customers dining in the fine dining restaurants of Pakistan through a self-administered questionnaire. The data were then analyzed through regression analysis and gap analysis. Model fitness was checked in SPSS AMOS through CFA.

The findings suggest that the key restaurant attributes have a significant positive effect on behavioral intentions. Customer satisfaction partially mediates the relationship between key restaurant attributes and behavioral intentions. The findings also suggest that there is a significant gap between the perceptions of customers regarding the importance and performance of key restaurant attributes.

The result indicates that food taste and environmental cleanliness are the cornerstones of fine dining restaurants’ success in Pakistan and are among the strongest predictor of customer satisfaction and behavioral intentions; while improvement efforts should be made in four key areas, i.e., healthy food option, food freshness, food safety and fair price.

No comparative study has been directed in fine dining restaurants of Pakistan with respect to the key restaurants attributes, i.e., food quality attributes, service quality attributes, atmospheric quality attributes, and other attributes which have been analyzed in the current study. This research was conducted to investigate the perceptions of customers toward the fine dining restaurants of Pakistan to measure the key restaurants’ attributes that influence customers’ satisfaction and their post-dining behavioral intentions. This study will facilitate restaurants’ managers to understand the stronger and as well as the weaker aspects of service quality and permit them to investigate the factors which contribute toward customers’ satisfaction and their post-dining behavioral intentions in order to build and maintain long-term relationship between restaurants and customers.

This paper aims to synthesize the services marketing and hospitality marketing literature, identify a gap in hospitality specific marketing models and develop the constituency model for hospitality marketing.

This study is a research through extensive review of relevant literature in hospitality marketing and services marketing.

This paper presents the constituency model of hospitality marketing which conceptualizes hospitality marketing activities as being predominately either external marketing (links between management and target market segments), interactional marketing (links between frontline providers and target market segments) or internal marketing (links between management and frontline providers). According to this model, each of these three areas has planning, implementation and control functions.

Builds upon the hospitality literature by presenting the constituency model.

Practitioners, marketers and academics in the field of hospitality will find this useful in guiding the future growth of hospitality marketing literature and related pedagogy. The aim of this paper is to stimulate dialogue regarding the dominant paradigm in the field.

This research examines the hospitality and services marketing and presents a new model for hospitality marketing.