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The “open‐door” policy started by the late Deng Xiao Ping has not only been maintained since his death but under the new Chinese leadership it has been encouraged even further. Because of this China has seen an unprecedented number of tourist arrivals which in turn has led to an explosion in the construction of hotels. However, due to poor vocational educational facilities and staff for hospitality subjects there is a dearth of qualified hotel operatives. This work examines Chinese hotel employees’ perceptions of various elements of vocational education associated with the Chinese hotel industry. This was done by asking staff to rank their feelings on a bi‐polar scale and the results examined using Kelly’s Repertory Grid principal components analysis.

Customer service training for food service staff is typically structured around simple procedures (often based on acronyms) and is restricted to induction training. Two potential limitations stem from these practices: current training may fail to address the subtle general changes in approach which come with experience in food service: current approaches may not highlight the differences in service situations which could benefit from changes in specific behaviour, i.e. situations to which customer service can be tailored. Describes a study identifying the sophistication of food service skills and highlights many general behavioural differences between novice and experienced staff. Reveals a framework of different customer/ situation contexts to which service behaviours can be tailored. Discusses the implications of the study for staff training.

The industrial placement is a crucial part of any hotel and catering sandwich course. The article examines the views of college staff, students and industry about such placements.

With the ever‐critical travelling public now venturing throughout China, not only does China need hotel staff, it needs staff who are trained to international standards. Looks at job satisfaction indicators for the hotel sector in China as perceived by local employees. Also examines the disparity between what staff expect and what they actually think they get in the way of satisfaction.

Investigates the interrelationship between tourism and leisure, based on a questionnaire survey and on personal communication with international tourists, hospitality workers and local residents. Adopts an integrative approach in the case study of the two coastal cities of Xiamen and Quanzhou, in the Fujian Province of the People’s Republic of China. Concludes that superficial homogeneity in social phenomena of two cities in close vicinity does not justify an actual similarity in the interaction between tourists and residents and the integration of tourism and leisure.

The aim of this paper is to explore the extent to which employee welfare and human resource management impacts on customer service.

Data were collected from a number of operational staff of the Mount Kosciusko ski fields in Australia. The staff was selected at random and comprised both permanent local staff and seasonal staff, and completed a self‐administered questionnaire.

The results highlight the challenging living conditions of many seasonal workers on whom the industry depends and at the organizational level this research demonstrates a need for effective management skills and employment strategies that reflect the needs of seasonal staff. As was shown, there is a relationship between staff satisfaction, camaraderie and customer satisfaction.

To better gauge the extent to which this research is applicable to all “front line” employees this study could be replicated in such locations as islands or isolated resorts with comparisons made with the same labor in established tourism resorts. The limitation of this study would be the specific mountain location in which it was conducted, and the size of the sample.

This study clearly identifies an area of human resource management which needs to be considered. When a region relies heavily on seasonal staff their welfare should be of prime consideration, because disgruntled staff translates directly into disgruntled customers.

This paper adds a clearer understanding to the body of knowledge surrounding staff retention in the service industries.

The significance of well-being in social development policy and practice is increasingly acknowledged by scholars and practitioners worldwide. Nevertheless, when examining well-being within the context of Global South trends, existing conceptualisations seem to yield incongruent indicators. Given the background, this paper aims to synthesise theoretical and empirical literature on well-being to foster an understanding of well-being in contemporary Global South.

This article reviews the now large literature on the well-being in the Global South. The article begins with a discussion of the contributions of state-of-the-art developments in well-being studies, a realm experiencing remarkable growth in social policy studies. It then turns to the prominent well-being constructs that have garnered considerable attention within the literature, with an examination of the Global North and Global South context followed by reinterpretation of these concepts to facilitate a comprehensive study of well-being beyond the realms of welfare states. Concluding the narrative, a succinct outline of potential pathways for future research is presented in the final section.

The review reveals that the concept of well-being in the Global South does not necessarily deviate entirely from the prevailing belief that the region is fundamentally distinct from the Global North on a conceptual level. The authors have discovered that three core dimensions of well-being, namely objective, subjective and relational, are observable across societal boundaries due to the diffusion of knowledge and social and cultural practices that have progressively aligned them with Global North-style modernisation. An exception arises in the relational aspect, where the attainment of positive collective relationships precedes individual happiness to some extent. The paper advances a renewed perspective on well-being, portraying it as a situational, interconnected, collective undertaking and continuous process. These approaches empower the researchers to address the overarching question of which analytical foundations can most effectively uncover the intricacies of well-being in diverse and contemporary circumstances.

This paper helps the researchers to address the overarching question of which analytical foundations can most effectively uncover the intricacies of well-being in diverse and contemporary circumstances, thereby facilitating future enhancements in social policy design.