Hospitality in Asia

A New Paradigm

Kaye Chon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429760082
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

In a rapidly advancing era, a fresh look at the concept of hospitality from socio-cultural perspectives is needed. This book proposes that a new paradigm in hospitality has been developed in Asia due to its unique culture, social values and traditions.

Based on Kaye Chon's extensive field research and experience teaching in hospitality over three decades, this book provides a historical review of the hospitality industry. In order to continue the sustained growth of the hospitality industry and improve quality, it is vital for the industry to create new business models. A flexible approach should be adopted, using new, and different, ways to enhance business instead of traditional methods which may now be outdated. It is vital that new business models embrace innovation and, at the present time, this means finding ways to implement new technology. The eight chapters in the book are richly detailed with case studies and insights from the author's own experiences, providing cutting-edge perspectives on understanding a new paradigm of hospitality embraced in Asia.

Written in an accessible style, this book will be valuable reading to students and practitioners who wish to further understand the rapidly developing hospitality and tourism industries in Asia. It will be a useful resource for those studying hospitality, tourism development, leisure studies, business studies management and the service industries.

1

On the Asian paradigm

Nothing in this life is permanent and change is inevitable. That is a fact of life. In my case, my life has undergone major changes that not only affected me and my family but also had a significant impact on a professional level.

The first major change I made to my life was when I was a teenager living in South Korea and I had decided I wanted to see the world. When I was old enough, I left my home in South Korea and headed overseas for the first time to the United States to study hospitality management and then assume academic positions at the University of Houston, University of Nevada - Las Vegas and Virginia Tech in the United States.

Years later, I made an even bigger life-changing decision. An opportunity had arisen to make a difference as an educator in Asia; the timing was right as a new chapter was being created in the evolving global hospitality and tourism industry. I could see large-scale changes were occurring in Asia and after much deliberation I knew I had to be in the midst of it all.

So I left my comfort zone and relocated to Asia with my family in the late 1990s after being sought after to become the Head of the Department of Hotel and Tourism Management at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (over the years, the Department became a School and my title changed to Director and then Dean). Because of my peripatetic nature and my job requiring me to give lectures at various places around the world, especially in the Asian continent, I have been well-placed to observe a gradual shift in tourism’s centre of gravity from Europe to North America to Asia.

The 21st century has already witnessed an explosion in the number of visitors coming to Asia and greater numbers of tourists visiting the region are expected in the coming decades. But why has this tourism shift towards Asia occurred? To study this phenomenon, it is worth examining the history of hospitality and tourism education in terms of ‘waves’ in the tourism industry and also in terms of the shift in paradigms across continents. A paradigm is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘a worldview underlying the theories and methodology of a particular scientific subject’, or more simply ‘a philosophical or theoretical framework of any kind’. Historical developments in this industry along with progress made in academic research have resulted in three different paradigms cropping up in different regions of the world to match the changes in the global tourism industry.

Throughout the ages, we have seen cumulative changes in the hospitality industry. Each successive paradigm did not replace what had come before it because the industry evolves from the existing paradigm as new additional knowledge is accumulated. The main drivers of each paradigm had been, to paraphrase the physicist Isaac Newton, ‘standing upon the shoulders of giants’, meaning that they had been able to advance further only because of the vital contributions that preceded them.

Tourism and hospitality are not some modern phenomena, though, as they have existed since humans have walked the Earth. People travelled during ancient times because they needed to hunt for food at different places where they knew they could find their prey. They had to leave their homes to hunt for food and then bring it back to feed their families. As civilisations developed, merchants and traders travelled for business, including Marco Polo who arrived in China − which was then known as Cathay − as a merchant to explore what he could buy or sell.

The European paradigm

International tourism began in Europe after the Industrial Revolution exploded in the 19th century. That era enabled people to become more productive because of the advances of science being applied to the manufacturing process, and so workers were more efficient and that freed up their time and gave them the opportunity to travel for leisure.

That was reflected in the Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days, when the fictional character Phileas Fogg circumnavigated the world using various modes of transport in a relatively short length of time that his acquaintances thought was impossible. The story fascinated its readers because it was set in those heady days when the vast Indian railways had just been linked across the Indian sub-continent, the Suez Canal was opened which allowed ships to cross the world easily instead of taking the long way around Africa, and also the Pacific Railroad was built which connected the eastern US rail network to the west coast of the United States. These technological breakthroughs opened up the possibility of people visiting faraway places in relative comfort and they signalled the end of travelling as the preserve of the intrepid explorer.

Because of this new breed of traveller, hotel hospitality evolved in Europe to accommodate wealthy Europeans wanting to see the various cultures in Europe with their own eyes. That is how modern-day international tourism started and there was a need to develop new, professional ways of running businesses. It was under these circumstances that the European Paradigm formed. The first wave associated with it was spearheaded by the Lausanne Hotel School, a venerated Swiss institution founded in 1893. At this pioneering school, students were taught their trade through apprenticeships based on professional practices, which is a common feature in tourism schools today. This paradigm saw the convergence of ‘management’ education and the emphasis was on developing practical skills.

The North American paradigm

Years later, the second wave occurred when the North American paradigm was pushed to the forefront due largely to favourable conditions after World War II. During the Eisenhower era, the country developed massive infrastructure networks, mostly of road transportation. Interstate highways were developed from state to state in response to the profusion of mass-produced automobiles coming out of the Henry Ford car plants. US citizens were becoming accustomed to travelling long distances by car; long journeys that could span days meant that travellers needed a few places to stop and get a good night’s sleep before reaching their destination.

This need for overnight accommodation allowed an enterprising fellow named Kemmons Wilson to establish the first Holiday Inn hotel in 1952. Seen as the genesis of the modern hotel chain, this model had never existed before Mr Wilson came on the scene. If a traveller drove from New York to Florida, it would take three days and so he would have to stay overnight in a hotel or motel. Mr Wilson thought that if there was a brand of hotel that offered the same features everywhere, people could predict the quality of where they might stay. Whenever drivers would see the ‘Great Sign’ – a large, eye-catching roadside sign Holiday Inn pioneered – then they would be more inclined to check in to the establishment as they would already know what to expect. After Holiday Inn became a household name, other hotel chains followed in the same vein, including Marriott and Best Western.

I had the honour of meeting Mr Wilson twice. The first time was when I worked as a corporate trainee for Holiday Inn and I had to attend the Holiday Inn training school in Memphis, which is where he came to visit one time. The second time I met him was years later when I was a professor at the University of Houston, and he was invited as a speaker for a congregation. During the speech, Mr Wilson told the graduating students to look under the chairs and they would find something they could keep. The bemused audience members all got up and lifted their own chair to find a dollar bill (before the event, staff members were instructed to tape a dollar bill under each of the 300-odd chairs). He said that if you want to make money you must get your ‘ass out’! In other words, if you want to be successful you have to work hard.

Another factor driving the North American paradigm was the emergence and influence of US hotel schools. The first of these was the Cornell Hotel School, and it was instrumental in getting hospitality and tourism education recognised as an area of study and research in universities.

Founded in 1922, the hotel school was started by accident rather than design as courses were originally run by the department responsible for the study of Home Economics. Young women in those days went to university to become good housewives and were taught how to manage the home. If they had an extra bedroom, they learnt how to decorate the room and rent it out to overnight visitors, like a bed and breakfast, to generate extra income. From this modest beginning, the Cornell Hotel School developed into a hotel school and then became a prestigious institution that turned hospitality management into a serious academic discipline for both genders. The school created a sought-after professionalism to match expectations after the explosive growth of the US tourism industry in the post-World War II era. It played a significant role in the development of the hospitality ‘management’ curriculum, and bred well-rounded managers who could set up multi-unit operations of hospitality businesses. In the US, franchise businesses were expanding in the hospitality and restaurant sectors, so the operators began to realise they needed managers equipped with knowledge and management know-how in areas such as finance, marketing, people management and strategic management to manage their business effectively on a much larger scale.

The shift towards Asia

The study of hospitality in Asia started emerging during the 1960s – a decade that saw a huge rise in the number of foreigners from Europe and North America taking vacations in the region and which led to Asian hospitality schools sprouting in the region (see Figure 1.1). Asia, compared to Europe and North America, came to the party late as it was still finding its feet in the post-war modern era. Thailand was a popular destination for US soldiers taking R&R, but then in the 1960s soldiers started visiting other Asian countries including Hong Kong when they had a hankering for decent Western food. James Bond even has a stopover at an infamous topless bar in the former British colony while on a secret mission in the film The Man with the Golden Gun.

FIGURE 1.1 Students and teachers from the early diploma courses on hospitality that were first taught in 1979 at the Hong Kong Polytechnic.

In the last few decades, the region has experienced a huge rise in the number of visitors and that has given Asian tourism and hospitality operators the chance to put their own unique stamp on management in this sector. Asian countries have their own culture, history, religions and practices that are unique to the region. That is why Asian hospitality sectors could never fully embrace the methodologies of the European or American paradigms because it would have meant a loss of their true identity as people who put hospitality at the heart of whatever they do (see chapter 2, ‘On hospitality’, pp. 9–16).

If the European Paradigm was about apprenticeships and being mentored by a master, and the North American Paradigm was largely about managing multiple units of hospitality businesses – and particularly in multicultural business environments – and therefore possessing the necessary skills and knowledge that US hospitality businesses needed for rapid expansion both in the domestic market and also on the international front, then the Asian paradigm is the balance between Europe’s practical side of acquiring the necessary skills and the analytical side from the US. But what makes it truly distinct from the other two paradigms is that Asian cultural values are integrated in service management, whether it is the warm smiles from the bellmen at hotels in Thailand willing to go the extra mile or the deep bowing employed by waitresses at Japanese restaurants whenever diners enter.

In the same way as the European and American paradigms were moulded by key factors, the paradigm shift to the ‘centre of gravity’ in Asia has come about through what I call ‘Asian Waves’. This shift occurred because the per capita income in Asia has been continuously rising, whereas it has been gradually falling in Europe because of the economic slowdown. In the past, outbound tourism had always been dominated by Europeans but now that has shifted to Asians as they now have greater economic clout (see Figure 1.2).

FIGURE 1.2 I am with PolyU president Timothy Tong (centre) and other industry leaders at the opening of the Asia Pacific Forum for Graduate Students’ Research in Tourism held at Hotel ICON and hosted by SHTM in 2016.

Several contributing factors have made that possible. Asia is the largest continent in the world not only in terms of land mass but also by population. According to estimates made by the United Nations Population Division in 2017, 1.39 billion people – approximately 18.5 percent of the world’s population – live in China, and India is not far off with 1.34 billion people. When you factor in the population figures for Indonesia (263.5 million, the fourth most populous country in the world), Japan (126 million), Thailand (68.3 million), as well as for other Asian countries such as South Korea (50.7 million), then it is plain to see the proportion of potential tourists is indeed high when approximately 60 percent of the world’s population – just over 4.5 billion people – live in Asia.

In the past, most Asians did not have the same level of economic mobility as the Europeans and Americans possessed and so they were not able to afford the luxury of travelling on aeroplanes and staying in hotels for a vacation. But with the emerging Asian economies’ explosion in wealth because of rapid industrial development and the entrepreneurial culture Asia is renowned for, they now have the disposable income that allows them to travel overseas to various far-flung destinations that were once just a dream for them. Economic change has been incredibly rapid for the Asian Dragons, just like in South Korea which was once one of the poorest countries in the world because the country had been ravaged by the Korean War in the early 1950s. In the 1970s, the per capita income was below those of other Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries, but it is now one of the wealthiest countries in the world and its electronic firms and pop culture celebrities have become international household names that bring major revenues to the country. Economic prosperity is predicted to continue as plans are afoot for major investment in Asia including the One Belt, On...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. On the Asian paradigm
• 2. On hospitality
• 3. On Confucianism
• 4. On leadership and management
• 5. On innovation
• 6. On fostering organisation culture
• 7. On marketing
• 8. On passion and drive
• 9. Final thoughts
• References
• Index