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The main purpose of this chapter is to investigate whether hotel hospitality mediates and/or moderates the relationships between surprise experience and customer delight in the context of hotel services. This study, involving 300 Malaysian and non-Malaysian hotel guests, employs questionnaire surveys as the main data collection method. The results indicate that there is a strong and positive relationship between surprise and customer delight, and hotel hospitality mediates and also moderates the abovementioned direct relationship.

The “sharing economy” has blurred the lines between personal and commercial operations for many sectors of the economy. A convergence has occurred between hotel companies and home sharing platforms, as Airbnb is investing in brick-and-mortar hotels, and conversely hotel companies are investing in home sharing platforms as each of the sectors tends to mimic the other. Important aspects for the hosts of Airbnb are the quality of social interaction between guest and host and the level of authenticity of social exchanges provided by interactions with locals. There is both a quantitative and qualitative demonstration of professionalization within Airbnb's organization. The aim of this research is twofold: to measure to what extent guests are aware of the professional level of the host and to evaluate the importance of these professional aspects at the different moment of the vacation process (booking, stay, and post experience).

The purpose of this chapter is to identify hospitality meanings among hotels employees and guests and its consequences on guests’ intention. A qualitative approach using in-depth interviews was used for data collection. The study findings reveal that hospitality definitions range from state of mind to service management oriented. Also, hospitality conception seems to have a pentagonal structure revolving around personalization, comfort, relationship guest/host, hospitableness and warm welcoming dimensions. Besides, Mediterranean culture, satisfying and understanding guests’ needs appear to influence hospitality perceptions. Cultural sensitivity is a critical skill that may help hospitality providers in coping with guests’ cultural differences. Finally, hospitality perceptions may foster behavioral and affective loyalty.

Cultural tourism comprises several heterogeneous activities. According to tourists’ interest in culture and their level of involvement with the local population during the trip, segments of cultural tourism can be identified. Regarding their characteristics and the place of the visit, this chapter explores how cultural tourism can contribute to a country like Iran. Based on the literature, the discussion begins by describing tourists’ profile while highlighting some features related to their traveling behavior. In line with past studies on host–guest relations and the current stage of development of the country as an international destination, potential impacts of opening the country to international cultural tourists are analyzed.

Independent actors operating through peer-to-peer sharing economy platforms co-create service experiences, such as shared car-rides or home-stays. Emotional labor among both parties, manifested in the mutual enactment of socially desirable behavior, is essential in ensuring that these experiences are successful. However, little is known about emotional labor practices and about how sharing economy platforms enforce emotional labor practices among independent actors, such as guests, hosts, drivers, or passengers. To address this research gap, we follow a mixed methods approach. We combine survey research among Airbnb and Uber users with content analysis of seven leading sharing economy platforms. The findings show that (1) users perform emotional labor despite not seeing is as necessarily desirable and (2) platforms actively encourage the performance of emotional labor practices even in the absence of direct formal control. Emotional labor practices are encouraged through (hard) design features such as mutual ratings, reward systems, and gamification, as well as through more subtle (soft) normative framing of desirable practices via platform and app guidelines, tips, community sites, or blogs. Taken together, these findings expand our understanding of the limitations of peer-to-peer sharing platforms, where control over the service experience and quality can only be enforced indirectly.

Delivering services that create memorable luxury accommodation experiences rely on frontline staff to engage guests on a sensory level rather than merely a functional one. This engagement includes cognitive, emotional, relational and behavioural. Hospitality and tourism industries are people-orientated – people are needed to serve people in order to create desired experiences – and it is very difficult to create satisfaction or to revisit intention in every interaction that takes place. It is this intangible characteristic of the industries, provisions and tangible cues that play an important part in enhancing the overall luxury accommodation experience. Guests are very clear as to what they expect from luxury accommodation experiences: they feel that they are paying for a service that should be personalised, and that staff should realise what they want and need. The human interaction component and the co-creation that occurs between staff and guests is an essential dimension of the industry. The influence of these interactions on guest experiences and the delivery of services will be explored in this chapter.

Tourism recovery after the pandemic has failed to take the path leading to sensitivity and humaneness at destination level. This chapter argues that to open this path, we need to confront the belief that tourists are self-centred, fun-driven and cheating individuals. This view on tourists and more generally human beings is central to the neoliberal understanding of consumers. It has moreover taken a strong grasp on the mind of economists, politicians, academics and the public at large.

To counteract this idea, I call upon Aristotle's discussion of friendship. In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes between three forms of friendship: of utility, of pleasure, and of goodwill. Utility implies a relationship where people befriend each other in virtue of some good or service that they get or expect to get from each other. Friendships of utility, therefore, imply reciprocation. Friendships of pleasure can also be understood as a form of reciprocal altruism. However, friendships of goodwill are different because they are felt for others for their own sake and not in expectation of a favour in return. Friendships of goodwill include therefore others who may not be able to reciprocate, such as tourists staying only a short time at a destination. Looking through the lens of friendships of goodwill, one could argue that all tourists, including short-stay visitors, will be friendly and caring towards their hosts.

This chapter explores the soundness of friendships of goodwill in the light of more recent research on human nature. It also discusses its implications for our understanding of human beings, the relationship between hosts and guests, and ultimately the opportunity to steer tourism along a more sensitive, human and sustainable path.

This study conceptualizes commercial hospitality in the form of a conceptual framework, which it operationalizes by means of a questionnaire. A survey using this questionnaire was conducted in Switzerland and Thailand in order to investigate tourists’ levels of satisfaction with commercial hospitality in Switzerland and Thailand and to assess the conceptual framework. The questionnaire was filled in by 1001 tourists in both countries, 601 in Switzerland and 400 in Thailand. The results suggest that tourists in Switzerland are more satisfied with the hospitality in the context of tourism service than tourists in Thailand. The results also serve as an indication that the questionnaire used in this study is able to uncover cultural differences in hospitality in a tourism service context. It is assumed that domestic tourists are accustomed to local practices and are therefore more critical in assessing tourism employees’ hospitality skills and behavior.

The Asian paradigm is more than just a demonstration of visually impactful behaviors and practices by hospitality establishments that can be explained by their different Asian cultural backgrounds and reinforced by training; it is focused on the customer, leveraging of the commercial environment while highlighting, not hiding, cultural and destination differences to give people more reasons to visit and repeatedly use their properties. This chapter examines to evaluate transferability of Asian paradigm in hospitality management concepts to non-Asian countries; what and how Asian paradigm in hospitality management can be transferred. For the detailed level on examination and discussion of transferability of Asian concepts, the chapter includes case of Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts for operators’ point of view.

The Day the World Stopped is a science fiction film that narrates the days of mankind amid an alien invasion headed to avoid the climate change. We made the decision to use a similar title to narrate the facts that precede the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, and its immediate effects on the industry of tourism. Over years, scholars cited John Urry and his insight over the tourist gaze as well as the importance of tourism as a social institution. Of course, Urry never imagined that one day this global world would end. This chapter centers on the needs of discussing the concept of the wicked gaze, which exhibits the end of hospitality, a tendency emerged after 9/11. This chapter punctuates on the decline of hospitality—at least as it was imagined by ancient philosophers—in a way that the tourist gaze sets the pace to a wicked gaze. Whether hospitality and free transit were the foundational values of West, COVID-19, and the resulted state of emergency reveals a new unknown process of feudalization which comes to stay. The chapter is framed based on long-dormant philosophical debates, but given the complexity of this issue, the efforts deserve our attention.