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This paper aims to examine the interplay between self-efficacy and career inheritance and its influence on career commitment in the hospitality sector. High labour turnover, unclear career paths and the transient nature of the work available in hospitality render it a suitable industry context that allows us to explore career commitment patterns.

Drawing on life history methodology, semi-structured interviews were conducted with hospitality professionals holding a relevant degree but no longer employed in the hospitality industry.

The findings revealed the interplay between self-efficacy, career inheritance and career commitment, as well as the speed of decline of career commitment, visualised as patterns of the leaving process. Although an infinite number of variations are possible, data unveiled the three main patterns.

The schematic illustrations of the patterns of the leaving process are not representative. The purposive sample comprises only ex-hospitality professionals, and generalisations can be considered in future studies.

This newly conceptualised understanding of career commitment enables researchers to reconsider the fundamental reasons why individuals leave the hospitality industry, whilst also offering hospitality managers deeper insights into how the three identified patterns could inform recruitment and selection.

This paper contributes to the literature through its meaningful theoretical extension in the context of career development studies. The unique concept of the leaving process addresses the prevalent issue of turnover and generates important implications.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly becoming part of the hospitality industry. In times of staff shortages, AI used in the industry can have advantages, but it also brings with it the possibility of customer backlash. The purpose of this paper is to understand the potential response of millennial guests to the potential applications of AI in the hotel industry. The emphasis was on which hotel service encounter categories are most suited to replacing employees with AI in the context of the millennial guest experience.

This quantitative research used a survey questionnaire for the data collection. Responses from 169 millennials from six continents were analysed using a combination of descriptive statistics, t-tests, MANOVA tests and Bonferroni tests.

Four service encounter categories were studied: (i) “Check-in”, (ii) “Reception Services (excl. check-in)”, (iii) “Wellness” and (iv) “Food and Beverage Services”. The results showed that of these four categories, “Food and Beverage Services” is more suited to replacing employees with AI than “Wellness”.

The findings of this research are important as they contribute to the body of knowledge related to the implementation of AI in the hospitality industry and provide useful information to policymakers and hotel managers who may wish to identify suitable areas for investment related to AI in their operations.

This study offers useful insight on a cutting-edge topic of AI application for service encounters within the hospitality sector and confirms the suitability of some encounters.

The purpose of this study is to explore the risk factors that employers consider when assessing an employee’s business travel (BT) assignment and the risk treatment, crisis response and recovery strategies they use to discharge their BT duty of care.

An exploratory approach is taken with in-depth interviews of 21 executives, travel managers and insurance brokers involved with the management of BT in four international hotel groups. In all, 12 follow-up interviews were conducted to assess the possible COVID-19 impact on BT risk management processes.

Employers assess BT assignments considering the travel’s characteristics, including the destination’s risk profile against seven types of risks (health, political, transport, natural, crime, technology and kidnap), length of stay, travel mode and activities undertaken in the destination as well as the traveler’s profile which includes diversity and travel experience. Accordingly, they develop a range of duty of care strategies for BT risk treatment, crisis response and recovery.

BT practitioners can use the proposed framework to develop risk assessment methodologies based on more accurate destination and traveler profiles and pursue targeted risk treatment strategies and insurance policies. The proposed duty of care approach can be used as a blueprint for organizations to design and manage BT policies.

BT risk is an under-researched area. The extant research looks predominantly at travel risks and their assessment taking the traveler’s perspective. This study looks at business travel risk and explores it from an employer’s risk management perspective offering a BT risk assessment framework and a BT duty of care plan.

While the importance of social media will continue to grow, the purpose of this study is to provide a retrospective systematic literature review of the social media research published in major hospitality and tourism journals over a specific time period.

The study conducted a bibliometric analysis to review the literature of 439 social media articles published in 51 hospitality and tourism journals over a 15-year time span (2002-2016).

Ulrike Gretzel authored the highest fractional citations. The results indicated that social media-related research was mostly published in top-tier journals. The International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management was amongst the four leading journals in terms of the percentage of published social media articles. While inter-country social media research collaborations were relatively modest, interestingly, inter-country collaborations have been steadily increasing in the past five years. Another finding indicated that social media research in hospitality and tourism journals has been predominantly quantitative. The results revealed six new areas within the consumer behaviour research theme, namely, eWOM, service recovery, customer satisfaction, brand/destination image and service quality. Finally, it is important to note that four new trends in social media research appeared between 2011 and 2016, namely, big data, netnography, Travel 2.0 and Web 2.0.

While this study made significant contributions to the social media literature, some limitations do exist. For example, the current research excluded publications from major conferences, books, book chapters and dissertations. Additionally, it is not within the scope of this paper to take into account issues related to self-citations.

The results obtained from analysis contribute to a comprehensive understanding of social media research progress in hospitality and tourism. For example, evaluating the performance of individual scholars helps educational institutions to compete in the global university ranking system. Additionally, to compete for funding opportunities on the topic of social media, institutions can use citation counts to demonstrate their competitiveness. Furthermore, due to the expected future growth in the number of social media platforms, practitioners need to understand motivating factors and tourists’ needs in different countries, target market segments, age groups and cultures to create highly engaging communities around their brands.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the sample of this study synthesized the largest selection of social media articles published in hospitality and tourism journals. This is the first study to apply the fractional score at the author level, the adjusted appearance score at the university level and the average citation score at the journal and inter-country levels in the analysis. In addition, prevalent research orientations and research trends in social media made significant contributions to existing literature.