The Role of the Hospitality Industry in the Lives of Individuals and Families

Pamela R Cummings, Francis A Kwansa, Marvin B Sussman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135409296
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

The Role of the Hospitality Industry in the Lives of Individuals and Families explores the evolution of the hospitality industry and the relationships between hospitality providers, their families, and the guests they serve. Focusing on the human aspect of the business, this text will give hospitality providers a better understanding of the human relations issues that they or their employees may face and show them how your services affect guests. Offering research and insight into customs and traditions that have influenced modern services, The Role of the Hospitality Industry in the Lives of Individuals and Families will teach you how to better meet the needs of guests at the national or international level while learning how the industry affects employees and their lives outside of work.The Role of the Hospitality Industry in the Lives of Individuals and Families discusses many different themes that relate to the improvement of the profession for both guests and employees, such as the spiritual, philosophical, and historical provisions of hospitality; the human resource and work issues of employees in the industry; consumer and family demands; and marketing strategies for hospitality organizations. In addition, this text discusses many issues that affect guests and that affect you as an employer or employee, such as:

• responding to the needs of travelers for a "home away from home"
• dealing with the social and health issues of guests
• recognizing the changing food habits of Americans and their impact on the hospitality industry
• examining the frequently negative attitude of Americans toward service hospitality employees
• balancing a career in the hospitality industry and family life
• researching the frequency of fast food patronage by older adults and the importance of hotel/motel services to older adults to determine if areas of service need improvement
• protecting employees from overly demanding guests
• balancing compassion, generosity, and idealism with the corporate profit maximization mandateThe Role of the Hospitality Industry in the Lives of Individuals and Families also examines the cultural relationships fostered by the hospitality industry as a benefit and proof of quality services. Complete with ideas for further research, this text will help you and your employees evaluate the personal effects of the hospitality industry and help provide better services to guests.

Part I: Spiritual, Philosophical and Historical Provision of Hospitality

The Spiritual Essence of Hospitality Practice: Seeing the Proverbial Stranger as a Pretext to Reading Ourselves

Michele Grottola

SUMMARY. This paper is consciously interdisciplinary. The literature of theology, myth, and folklore is juxtaposed with the literature of family systems, organizational studies, and service management to explore the multifaceted meaning of the term hospitality practice. The related origins of such words as guest, host, and stranger are presented to create a model of possibility capable of imagining how the ancient image of the proverbial stranger at the door remains an apt metaphorical model for hospitality practice to be enacted on both private as well as public levels of social interaction. The interconnectedness derived from such meanings, drawn between older forms of hospitality practice and its contemporary reincarnation in a formalized industry niche, called Hospitality, are intended to articulate how service quality is an attribute that the industry owes as much to its employees as to its customers. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-342-9678. E-mail address: [email protected]]

KEYWORDS. Hospitality, Hospitality management, Hospitality industry, Service management

… for I was hungry and you gave me food,

I was thirsty and you gave me drink,

I was a stranger and you welcomed me.

Matthew 25:35

Hospitality practice is the humanistic art of being able to give as well as to receive and, in the spirit of that exchange, requires us to understand how both acts comprise a unified experience. It may be said that such practice comprises the essence of what it can mean to live successfully in a global world on both individual and collective levels.

The term hospitality derives from the word “hospice,” a house of rest for pilgrims during medieval times (Metelka, 1990, p. 73), but as Russell Lockhart has written in his book, Words as Eggs,

behind every word we use-for the most part so casually-there lies a story to be found, if we are willing to attend to its inner meaning. There is a level on which the essential story will be the same for all seekers, but also a level where it will be unique for everyone of us … so also are the stories that nourish every single human life. (Luke, 1990, p. 17)

In her paper The Stranger Within, Helen Luke uses Lockhart’s words about meaning to further explore such words as hospitality, guest, and stranger. We learn that these words are more intricately bound to one another than common vernacular would automatically tell us. Luke writes:

The American Heritage Dictionary tells us that the Indo-European root of the words “host,” “hospice,” “hospitality,” and “hospital” is ghosti; it is, surprisingly, also the root of the word “guest.”… Moreover, in the Indo-European Appendix the meaning of this root includes another word: ghosti meant “stranger” as well as “guest” and “host,” properly, “someone with whom one has reciprocal duties of hospitality.” (1990, p. 17)

What are these reciprocal duties that exist? One excellent source of readings that lends insight to this question is found in the special issue about the multiple meanings of hospitality that was published by Parabola: The Magazine of Myth and Tradition in 1990. In the opening editorial, a section called Focus, D. M. Dooling writes:

Do we ever take an idea seriously enough? That is a question that arises after some years of pondering themes for Parabola. By pondering, I don’t mean only cerebrating, whether alone or in company, nor reading what others who ponder with us have written. Spending weeks with the predominating thought of a certain theme opens other avenues than those of the ordinary mind.

One begins to experience the idea in action and to feel it in a certain way. It makes its own surprising connections; one idea links itself with another, or perhaps with several. There seems to be an endless network of relationships in which every concept expands into a bewildering infinity; and what becomes clear is that we cannot take any word for granted and say we understand it.

So we cannot take for granted the familiar word hospitality when we begin to see it in its rich context. All our contributors agreed that hospitality is a form of exchange, not a one-sided beneficence. The soup kitchen, though necessary, isn’t in itself hospitality; maybe the lack of real hospitality in our day is the reason why people are homeless and soup kitchens exist. The exchange we speak of requires another level, and seems to correspond with a human need even deeper, and far harder to satisfy, than physical hunger. Its nature is a profound question. (1990, p. 2)

In this paper, I wish to explore the possibility of expanding the term, hospitality practice, in richly interdisciplinary layers so that an often forgotten soulful essence can not only be remembered, but also be savored. Then, I want to associate hospitality practice with both how an individual acts in the role of guest and/or host, as well as, later on in this paper, how an industry may do the same for its employees as well as its customers. Such interconnectedness as the above quote by Dooling suggests, helps us to “experience the idea in action” (1990, p. 2) and build a bridge between the theory and the need for a renewed practice.

The Interconnectedness between Strangers and Ourselves

From the special issue of Parabola, one learns that the reciprocal duties of hospitality practice as they exist among and between hosts, guests, and strangers are well documented in the most ancient biblical texts of our civilization, the mythic literary traditions such as those to be found, for example, in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or the plays of the Oresteia from Greece’s golden age of drama, as well as in plebian folklore customs.

In Philoxenia and Hospitality, Lambros Kamperidis (1990) uses the vehicle of his own childhood memory to recount one such custom. He describes how, at Christmas, his parents insisted upon setting a place at the table for the stranger or the wayfarer who might happen by their rural farmhouse door. This same ritual would be repeated again on New Year’s Eve when his mother would save and permanently reserve a slice of homemade St. Basil’s bread for the same purpose.

Kamperidis stresses that it did not matter whether a stranger ever physically appeared on the holiday scene because “even if not physically present, a stranger occupied a certain place in the household. In case he or she materialized, usually brought by a friend, the stranger would be treated as a member of the family and entertained in a most cordial way. An inviolable rule of the hospitality offered to strangers is to accept them unconditionally. No questions concerning their origins or their station in life are permitted, and nothing is expected in return” (1990, p. 5).

Such ritualistic holiday traditions originated in the religious belief systems of agrarian peasant cultures. Symbolically, their ritualistic forms speak to preserving the sacred character of the stranger so often written about in parables discovered throughout the world as written literature or as oral tales handed down from generation to generation. In such stories, a major character theme emerges whereby the stranger turns out to be either “God-sent” or the incarnation of the Lord, himself, who initially poses as a humble street beggar specifically to test the degree of charity for others held in the hearts of the leading characters in the parable.

Kamperidis reminds us that the first biblical reference to just such a charity-laden parable can be found in Genesis (18:1-8, 19:1-3) where the story is told about how three strangers appeared to Abraham as he sat at the door of his tent in Marme. The bible reports that Abraham knew immediately to welcome the three strangers as being God-sent by running to greet them and then, later, inviting them to accept his hospitality of food and beverages. This same sense of hospitality can be found in Bedouin culture, today, which is why “throughout history Abraham has been recognized as the exemplar of hospitality. The Talmud asserts, ‘Whoever on showing compassion is bent, from the Patriarch Abraham may claim his descent’” (Wolk, 1990, p. 80).

The story goes on to tell us that after greeting the new guests, Abraham invited the three strangers to sit beneath the shade of his oak trees where he washed their feet with water and served them a meal of cake baked from fine grain, curds, and milk. Later, Abraham accompanied the strangers to Sodom where they encountered Lot who was seated by the gate of the city. Lot repeats the same rites of hospitality for the strangers as did Abraham.

This parable recounts a culture of hospitality practice that clearly extends the meaning of one of the Ten Commandments, namely: Love thy neighbor as thy self. One pretext, or subtext, to this commandment may well be: one’s neighbor is yourself, in the form of another human being. The metaphorical use of the term, “God-sent,” with reference to strangers conveys the possibility of God existing in each one of us, and how all strangers and wayfarers are interconnected to us in a very direct way.

Later in the parable about Abraham and Lot, the bible tells us that the wicked men of the city gathered around Lot’s house demanding that the strangers be turned over to them, but Lot refuses and tells the intruders that he would rather submit his own daughters to their lust than give them the strangers “for they have come under the shelter of his roof” (Kamperidis, 1990, p. 6). Lot and Abraham are enacting the rule of hospitality: once a stranger comes under the roof of the host, it is the host’s sacred obligation to protect him or her.

This sacred character of the stranger is intricately associated with the belief that each of us shares with the stranger the same journey or predicament in this life through the vital bond of sheer humanity. In fact, one can say that this is the essence of how hospitality practice came to evolve beside the many cultural tales of the proverbial stranger at the door.

In re-telling this story, Kamperidis is illustrating how “the host feels responsible for what may happen to his guests; if he cannot avoid disaster, he is willing to meet it himself, rather than involve the strangers who are under his protection” (1990, p. 6). Kamperidis writes:

The practice of hospitality, the sharing of the goods of the earth with another fellow creature, the unconditional acceptance of the stranger and his or her integration into our life, constitute the very essentials of a eucharistic relationship with the Creator of all.

By giving generously of what has been bestowed on us to the stranger, by sharing the fruits of the earth, we render to God our thanksgiving for what has been offered to us. The stranger becomes the pretext, the means through which we enter into eucharistic communion with the Creator. Thus the stranger acquires a sacred character. (1990, p. 5)

An unmistakable ecology of themes in this summation evokes the consciousness of knowing that when we give to another human being, we are also nourishing ourselves; and, when we allow ourselves to receive from another, we are allowing him or her to do the same. The Buddhists call this karma. Other equally non-dogmatic terms could be humanism or voluntarism. Such an essence has many faces and belief systems and is not the territory of any one formalized religious dogma. However, the culturally, comparative, shared meaning is strikingly similar.

The inviolable bond of reciprocity is also illustrated in Homer’s Odyssey, when, for example, the guest departs from the host, he or she is given an astragalos, a die, or a symbolon, a ring, which is broken between the two. This symbolizes that the host and guest are one in the union of the hospitality that they have shared with each other.

Each person possesses part of the ring, symbolic of the union. The broken die, or the ring, becomes whole again upon reunion. However, reunion may or may not occur between these two people, but they in turn may host and be guest to others. The ring, or circle, may be said to stand for the metaphorical power of the intangible shared experience between those who share hospitality with one another.

Most cultures have spoken of hospitality practice among strangers from the most ancient to the contemporary day. Much of our contemporary terminology comes from ancient Greek and Latin. Kamperidis’ paper Philoxenia and Hospitality, in fact, takes its title from such meanings and readings to be found about Zeus who was known for his love of the sojourner. He writes:

Just as Yahweh loves the sojourner, so does Zeus, who takes on special attributes as the protector of the strangers. Xenos, in Greek, is the stranger, and an appeal to xenios Zeus-Zeus of the strangers-entitles the stranger to the rites of hospitality. Philoxenia, love towards strangers, especially in the Homeric age, is a sacred virtue to be cultivated, in the same way as philosophia, love of wisdom, in the classical age.

In the ecumenical age of Hellenism and Christianity, Philadelphia (love of one’s brother and sister) and philoxenia are coupled to form one indivisible virtue of charity and philanthropy (Hebrews 13:2). Only monsters unfit for human fellowship are deprived of the virtue of philoxenia. (1990, p. 7)

Within the context of parables, most modern families probably can relate to some form of ceremony that they practice which honors the stranger in some way. Surely, as the gap between the secular versus the older religious celebration of holidays widens in modern times, such personalized ritual as preserving a place at the table for a wayfarer probably becomes far less common.

Agrarian cultures, where such customs were easier to preserve, have evolved into a far more urbanized and crowded service economy. Due to the changing values and customs that result from such social change, the once-honored ritual of preserving a place setting at one’s table may only be a memory in our grandparents’ minds if it exists there at all, now.

“Charity,” in fact, may not be immediately recognized as a word once used in ancient scripture as a synonym for “love.” For example, in the New Testament, when Paul writes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• About the Editors
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Spiritual, Philosophical and Historical Provision of Hospitality
• Part II: Human Resource Issues in the Hospitality Industry
• Part III: Individual and Family Target Markets for the Hospitality Industry
• Index