Shapes of Tourism Employment

HRM in the Worlds of Hotels and Air Transport

Gwenaelle Grefe, Dominique Peyrat-Guillard, Gwenaelle Grefe, Dominique Peyrat-Guillard

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781786303547
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119751335
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

The ambition of this book is to propose a grid of reading able to illuminate the current HR transformations experienced by the big historical international companies of the sector of the tourism, carried away by what is known as the "3rd tourist revolution ". The latter is characterized by the combination of three main phenomena: internationalization, digitalization and hyper-personalization that refound the employment relationship between employers, unions and employees. Internationalization requires a renewal of business models heckled by the low-cost strategies of new operators provoking social reactions to the extent of perceived psychological disruptions, to question the validity of these same strategies. Digitization has opened the way to the disintermediation at the origin of the evolution of the trades front and back office. Finally, hyper-personalization and adaptation to new client behaviors justify the hegemony of soft skills for a redefined hospitality. In the end, the employee must constantly deal with often paradoxical injunctions (example: standardization of service protocols versus empowerment). A focus will be made on two specific branches: hotels and air transport which will each be part of a part. The topic will be illustrated by case studies and testimonials. The two coordinators of the book will draw on the contributions of researchers who collaborate with them in the framework of an international research program they pilot.

PART 1
Managing the Human Resources of Hotel Companies in the Face of Third Tourism Revolution Disruptions

Introduction to Part 1

While hospitality is a form of social relationship with an anthropological dimension, the hotel business is a modern innovation whose development has been encouraged by the invention of the Grand Tour. In other words, for a long time, it would seem that welcoming the other or the host did not constitute the content of dedicated professions. Indeed, for centuries, hospitality has been socially embedded in customary practices, opening its home to foreigners in accordance with ordinary courtesies that can be declined according to the rank of stakeholders. The nobility has long been able to organize reciprocal receptions, ritualized around a relationship that has been developed in castles or mansions. These private establishments knew how to compete in finery and prestige, serving the glory and reputation of the welcoming owner, and whose hosts also came to break idleness, thus becoming pretexts for play and social life.

More soberly, the monasteries reserved single rooms for this category of exclusive guests, while the dormitory was open to low social conditions. Finally, the “common people” also had to submit to the “right of lodging” of the nobility on its subjects by undertaking to receive in all circumstances an aristocrat in transit and without a roof for the night. Opening one’s door to foreigners also made it possible to disseminate information (political, cultural and economic) that would otherwise remain scarce.

With the development of trade and university flows that the creation of colleges could not all contain, particularly during stopovers between two scholarly destinations¹, mobility increased in the Middle Ages: travelers became too numerous to rely solely on the support of non-market accommodation. Under these conditions, civility evolved toward negotiated service. The figure of the inn developed, even if already soberly present on the ancient roads to shelter the moving armies. The inn reflected the rustic image of a makeshift stopover for captive individuals who did not express any pretensions. Neither luxury nor comfort accompanied its only proposals for accommodation and meals, which were conditioned by the “you sleep, you dine” principle. Health and safety were the two unknowns left to discover the daring traveler who never lingered, once he/she had rested and was fed enough. With the development of stagecoaches, the inn evolved in the 15th Century toward the model of the postal representative, where the owners acted as innkeepers as well as grooms. This type of establishment, most often located outside the cities, persisted for centuries without major changes and without offering anything other than an income for its couple of operators alone, with the help of a few versatile clerks.

It was therefore only with the invention of the Grand Tour that totally new needs emerged, linked to new forms of aristocratic mobility and social practices associated with resorts and tourist stays, even as society is about to recompose itself. The roaming of young English aristocrats forced cities to equip themselves with “guest houses” and then true hotels: first of all, urban hotels, for those who had to stop in targeted European capitals (the birth of major Parisian hotels), “Terminus” hotels at the foot of stations where they could stay before a trip or while traveling, and finally resort hotels, on spa, seaside or mountain towns. This new offer outlined a hotel business immediately associated with the concepts of comfort, luxury and prestige, served by “professionals” in the hospitality industry.

The social elite changed, especially in France after the Revolution, shifting its center of gravity from the nobility to the large bourgeoisie, which nevertheless wished to imitate the codes of the one it continued to envy. In the desire to mimic emerging tourist practices, it saw the hotel as the possibility of “castle life”, surrounded by staff capable of sumptuously replacing the servants. The latter, freed from their dispossessed historical employers, became the employees of these hotel institutions sometimes able to provide a job for life, and the illusion of a new “home”. At the same time, in the United States, the triumphant bourgeoisie lacked land: the large urban hotel became a “piece of town” and a marker of urbanity. It concentrated numerous and complementary services (hairdressers, banks, post offices, etc.) and offered the possibility of living according to high standards, comparable to what was played out in the old Europe. This model inspired, at a time when they were also emerging, the great European hotels and the “Commonwealth” hotels, in the colonies and resorts, which then themselves provided jobs for the Western hotel industry.

In addition, with the hotel, the promise that otherness, the one that always threatens intimacy, kept more at a distance than in the circumstances of non-market hospitality, is finally implicitly formulated: to do so, staff needed to meet the low-profile codes. Everything was designed to preserve anonymity; the client did not have to commit a sense of debt; rights and duties were more or less explained by the commercial contract (transaction). Under these conditions, the question of relational connection arose only in terms of the serving and the served, helping to transpose the figure of the lackey of the aristocratic society to the bourgeois society, a client of the Grand Hotels. If in the past, proximity to the householder was the basis of social superiority in the hierarchy of servants, with the hotel, we are witnessing an inversion of values and dominations: the closer the staff are to the client, the less free they are, depending on the tip (no fixed salary, a principle revised by the 1933 Godard law which established a percentage of service to be paid) and subject to the delivery. The chef, from now on ennobled by the hotel thanks to the know-how he or she possessed (culinary talent that guarantees the hotel’s reputation), thus took his or her revenge on the staff on the floors and in the dining room that were once part of the castles, by taking precedence over the hotel rank gained by the activation of the areas of uncertainty they mastered.

Hotel staff was not permanent, sometimes linking a winter season with a summer one, through an east-west migration. For example, entire trains transported employees to the Atlantic coast, many of whom were foreign, to meet the need to speak the language of customers. On floors where everything needed to be done to preserve privacy and morals (or at least limit temptations), couples were favored by recruiters to take care of governance tasks. All the hotel trades already in the process of structuring underwent another stage in their professionalism with the arrival of the palace, launched by César Ritz at the very end of the 19th Century. This model successfully chose to put the concepts of hygiene and efficiency at the heart of the hotel principle. With Auguste Escoffier in particular, it was the professions in the kitchen, transformed into a brigade according to the precepts of the scientific organization of work, that underwent the greatest changes, perishing Marie-Antoine Carême’s approach of a long decorative cuisine in favor of a cuisine that would gradually “standardize” itself to give birth to kind of a gastronomy criticized by some, yet hardly expected and reproduced on a large scale, in contradiction to the codes of great luxury. For years, hotel catering faded before undergoing a revival with the rebirth of Parisian luxury hotels at the dawn of the 2000s, in line with the logic of Michelin-starred-palace chef associations.

In any case, the Roaring Twenties saw the emergence of a flourishing hotel sector, leaning against luxury: the architectural model, symbol of the power of owners and clients alike, evolved from the styles of palaces or castles to real replicas sometimes of the liners whose gigantic size they took over: they thus employed numerous staff, experienced in the customs learned in hotel schools (the Lausanne school was created in 1893 and the Paris school in 1903) then emerging and providing full professionalism. These establishments, with their military rigor, train individuals whose dual mission is to preserve privacy while serving the prestige of the host in search of ostentation and social distinction. The Astier Act in 1919, then the Apprenticeship Charter in 1929, which emphasized the duties of the master, increasingly organized the training of staff perceived as mastering the codes of a hotel tradition in the process of r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• PART 1: Managing the Human Resources of Hotel Companies in the Face of Third Tourism Revolution Disruptions
• PART 2: Managing the Human Resources of Air Transport Companies in the Face of Third Tourism Revolution Disruptions
• Conclusion
• List and Biographies of Authors
• Index
• End User License Agreement