Chapter 6: The Commercial Campus Hotel: An alternative model to the traditional
Chapter 6: The Commercial Campus Hotel: An alternative model to the traditional hotel school?
Brian Hay
Brian Hay, Heriot-Watt University
Abstract
For too long, hospitality education has relied on established methods for training its future managers, with the traditional hotel school often seen as the gold standard in hospitality pedagogy. This chapter suggests that now is the time to consider new hospitality education models, particularly for non-hospitality students. For such students, a possible new model could be developed around the growing number of free-standing commercial university campus hotels, which are not linked to university hospitality education programmes. This chapter suggests that, for both hospitality and non-hospitality students, this model offers an alternative and perhaps more relevant method of entry into the hospitality sector.
Introduction
All research has a beginning, and often it is driven by a literature review and previous studies that highlighted areas for further investigation. However, the starting point for this chapter was different; it was an observation by a non-hospitality student who was working in a campus hotel: “I never thought of working in hotels, but now I am thinking about an M.Sc. in hotel management” (Hay, 2020, p. 12).
The worldwide spread of Covid-19 in 2020/21 had a profound impact on the hospitality sector: some hospitality businesses failed, some adapted to the new normal, while others emerged as the sector responded in different ways to the future needs of the consumer. As with all profound societal changes, there are always calls to return to the comfort of the tried and tested methods of the past, and hospitality education is not immune to this call. However, societal shocks also provide an opportunity to explore new opportunities, for, as suggested by Jones and Boer (2018, p. 161) “Innovative developments in hospitality education are becoming rare occurrences”, due to: bureaucratic difficulties, such as who is really responsible for the quality of the programme; fear of the unknown, for example the development of new hospitality programmes that are widely different from the current narrow hospitality education model.
Since the establishment of the first hotel school, the Ecole Hoteliere de Lausanne in Switzerland in 1893 (Yong et al. 2019), the hospitality sector has viewed the hotel school as the ideal model to provide education and skills development for its future managers (King & Tang, 2020). It can be argued that traditional hotel schools satisfied past markets, when hotels, travel, and hospitality services were designed to meet the needs of the well-travelled elite. However, in today’s market of budget hotels, low-cost airlines, online booking systems, and the importance of consumer experiences over physical products, a different range of skill sets are required to better meet ever-changing consumer expectations. Historically, hotel schools have been seen, for perhaps far too long, as