Employment Prospects in the Hospitality and Tourism Industry - Essay Example

Employment Prospects in the Hospitality and Tourism Industry Table of Contents Employment prospects in the Tourism and Hospitality Industry 3 Introduction 3 Historical Context 3 Economic Factors driving Employment in the Tourism and Hospitality Industry 4 Pre-Fordist Hospitality Industry and associated Employment Patterns 5 Employment patterns in Fordist Hospitality Industry 7 Employment Patterns in the Neo-Fordist Hospitality Industry 8 Conclusion 10 References 11 Employment prospects in the Tourism and Hospitality Industry Introduction The Tourism and Hospitality Industry has grown exponentially over the last century as a consequence of the increased wealth and leisure time afforded by industrialized nations. It is important to come to a better understanding of this burgeoning industry. As more people are drawn to the growth of the industry it is equally important to arrive at an understanding of future employment prospects in this field. This paper will place the Tourism and Hospitality Industry in its historical context and attempt to look at future trends which will guide employment prospects. Historical Context While Tourism has been a feature of the life of very wealthy people for a considerable time it has only become a mass phenomena of any significance since the post war period. The very wealthy members of the Roman upper class were known to frequent exotic parts of the their extensive empire in the spirit of exploration and adventure. In the more modern times a trip to the continent was considered part of the education of young members of the landed gentry in Britain. These were privileges of wealth but the tourist industry as a mass phenomena required several essential factors in place before it was to become a truly mass industry . Since Britain was the first country to achieve Industrialized status it is here where the first changes came. As Jafari points out it needed the requirement of a society as a whole that had enough money left over after meeting all of its essential needs for the purposes of entertainment; it needed the free time that was not consumed with the struggle to survive and it needed a conveniently accessible way in which to travel throughout the world. (Jafari, 2000, p. 10) Perhaps the first to seize the idea of mass travel was Thomas Cook who in 1841 who organized the first package tours.(Jafari, 2000, p. 12) The widespread growth of railway lines offered the way in which people could conveniently travel throughout the country . The early tourist destinations became the local fashion such as sea side resorts. The massive surplus of aircraft following World War II allowed the era of international travel to truly began. (Jafari, 2000, p. 15) Today the Tourism industry is one of the biggest in the world . The best way to understand the future employment prospects for the Tourism and Hospitality Industry is through an economic analysis of patterns and trends. Economic Factors driving Employment in the Tourism and Hospitality Industry An interesting approach to the factors that drive employment in the Hospitality and Tourism Industry is offered in the work of Debbage and Ionnadies . These authors argue for the pattern of transition in the consumer driven tourist industry that has parallels in the manufacturing industry. They suggest that the tourist industry exhibits what they label as characteristics of Pre-Fordist, Fordist and Neo-Fordist patterns with the trend increasingly being toward the latter. Pre-Fordist industry refers to an informal small business type operation and Fordist refers to mass production of a uniform scale. Finally Neo-Fordist is considered in the same spirit as post-modernism with its emphasis on the individual in a more fractured and less systematic sense. All of this jargon is intended as a reflection of the increasing sophistication of travellers a long with the great increase in both markets and consumers. Pre-Fordist Hospitality Industry and associated Employment Patterns The Pre-Fordist Hospitality industry is predominantly a small scale family based approach to business. This type of business is most often a small family owned type of business often run as a side business to another occupation that is associated with a primary occupation in agriculture or fishing. The size of such business types is often small and the employees are often part of a family business. The employment description is often unskilled and the work patterns involve long hours with people performing multiple roles in the business, such as cook, valet, doorman etc. These business by and large have been characterized by poor management practises and as a whole are often marginal. Despite the small scale of these industries they comprise a large part of the industry as the following information indicates: "For example, in Greece and France, most travel-related enterprises (i.e. hotels and restaurants) are family owned, employing fewer than ten persons (Leontidou 1988)" (Ioannides & Debbage, 1998, p. 109) This is not just the case on the continent. In Britain the pattern is similar as Ionnaides and Debbage further illustrate, “ In Britain, where the average hotel has twenty-five rooms, the majority of hotel rooms continue to be provided in family-run businesses like guest houses or bed and breakfast establishments (Shaw and Williams 1994)” (Ioannides & Debbage, 1998, p. 109) Given the size of this industry which is still at present characterized by a high degree of balkanization the future prospects for employment in these small industries remain high. A way in which to enlarge the scope of these industries from seasonal and marginal industries to a viable network of small businesses is through better management techniques. An ideal way in which to achieve this is through more wide spread use of the modern technology such as the internet which would perhaps remove the personal aspect of the business but achieve great gains in reaching a larger customer base more efficiently. Employment patterns in Fordist Hospitality Industry The Fordist Hospitality Industry has been labelled so because it has been characterised by widespread use of Economies of Scale to offer tour packages to consumers that resemble the mass product of an industrial line. These companies characterized by large hotels and airline industries have turned to greater volume, widespread use of informational and other technology, and brand sub segmentation to deal with great increase of competition that has come from the arrival of new competitors in the modern era of globalisation . The increase in size has certainly homogenized the nature of employment as the profit margin has been marked by the size of these industries: The major tour operators located in Western Europe and North America also exhibit a highly consolidated market structure (see Chapter 8 in this book). In the late 1980s, for instance, out of approximately 670 British travel wholesale companies, just two (Thomson and the International Leisure Group) controlled more than 53 per cent of the market. By 1989 77.5 per cent of inclusive tour holidays originating in the UK were sold by the leading five operators (Sinclair 1991) (Ioannides & Debbage, 1998, p. 112) The labour cost of these companies has been reduced by greater automation and streamlining. This pattern does not offer a promising picture for employment in this industry but it is not the whole picture by any means. The new increasing sophistication of the market in a new information based age has forced a degree of flexibility to the monolith of the Fordist concept. Brand Super- segmentation is a way in which the the big companies have tried to stay competitive in a new increasingly sophisticated market that is looking for unique needs. As the term suggests Brand Super Segmentation is the refinement of the services offered by the big companies to suit the niche requirements of consumers. Employment Patterns in the Neo-Fordist Hospitality Industry The modern age is now characterized by the widespread dissemination of Globalization. The interconnection of the work forces through the world wide web is part of a similar paradigm shift in the Hospitality Industry. The Neo-Fordist Hospitality Industry is marked by two important phenomena: Outsourcing and Strategic Network Alliances. Outsourcing of services which has become more a reality of other service industries is also true of the Hospitality Industry. More and more the subcontracting of work to competitive companies has become the practice in the Hospitality Industry. As it has been stated, “ It is not cost effective for a tourism-related firm to keep a permanent, highly skilled staff to deal with specialized services, given that the demand for many of these functions can be both irregular and unpredictable” (Bull and Church 1994). (Ioannides & Debbage, 1998, p. 116) In some ways this suggests the balkanization of the Pre-Fordist Hospitality Industries but this is not case because of the concurrent use of Strategic Network Alliances. Through the use of information technology and effective management principles these alliances allow the seamless integration of smaller and larger companies and also offer smaller companies advantages not seen in the Fordist model : "Importantly, they enable small and medium-sized tourism enterprises to amass collective bargaining leverage when dealing with CRS operators and other powerful industry players" (Ioannides & Debbage, 1998, p. 118) Employment patterns in such a new model are more based on smaller scaled teams interconnected through large extensive world wide networks. Presently this appears to be the future trend for employment patterns for the Hospitality Industry . Conclusion Employment prospects for the Hospitality Industry are increasingly promising. The future appears to lie in small, well managed teams that are integrated in a world wide network that allows full access to information and a wide variety of of sophisticated clientèle. There are many new niches that will continue to grow in the context of this new structural organization. There are such new avenues such as Health tourism, Lunar tourism, Adventure tourism. But all of these can be understood in terms of the context described in this paper. Even the threat of Global terrorism is allayed somewhat by the interconnection of information which makes surveillance of such anarchic elements easier and at the same time also ensure the pluralistic nature of the industry continues to thrive. References Beirman, D. (2003). Restoring Tourism Destinations in Crisis : A Strategic Marketing Approach /. Crows Nest, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin. 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