Darker still: Present-day slavery in hospitality and tourism services

This conceptual article is a piece of advocacy scholarship. Its objective is to draw the academy’s attention to the hospitality (and tourism) industries’ relationship with present-day slavery and human trafficking. While present-day slavery has been examined in the context of dark tourism, and also via the sex tourism industry, this article appropriates C. Lashley and A. Morrison’s three domain conceptualization of hospitality to argue that the labour requirements of hospitality services account for an alarming proportion of the world’s estimated human bondage population. Moreover, after J. Derrida, this article considers how the delivery of hospitality by slaves implodes a ‘knowing of hospitality’. These insights provide context for future humanistic and theoretical hospitality research agendas.