Hospitality & Society - Volume 13, Issue 1, 2023

Scandals are frequently considered as detrimental for involved businesses. When hotels serve as a backdrop and are collateral victims of scandals caused by high-profile individuals, we argue that entrepreneurially minded executives can envision scandals as an unexpected opportunity, likely to bring good news to the involved hotels. Tourism businesses offer supportive evidence. In a constructivist perspective, scandals and their consequences do not result from the transgression seriousness, but are socially constructed. Entrepreneurially minded individuals influence this social construction and seek to transform scandals into entrepreneurial opportunities. We analyse whether and how hospitality executives can channel the a priori destructive forces involved in a scandal eruption towards a direction aligned with their own interests. We identify three potential mechanisms by which hospitality executives can make the best of scandals, namely, by increasing exposure and attracting attention at a low cost, offering a basis for differentiation and innovation and generating useful marketing data. We identify some conditions that make this outcome more likely. Rather than just avoiding or containing the scandal consequences, we propose to equip hospitality executives with a scandal management plan that explicitly considers the bright side of scandals.

Relying on qualitative data obtained from newcomers in Winnipeg, Manitoba, this article critically examines hospitality, specifically host–guest dynamics, with special attention to cultural discontinuities and contentious policies on foreign credentials. In particular, this article sheds light on the contested nature of hospitality practices, thereby moving beyond the notion of vertical power relations between the nation state as host and immigrants as guests to acknowledge the existence of everyday reciprocal practices of welcoming and supporting one another, such as those occurring in ethnocultural communities. In order to highlight the challenges related to the implementation of the principles of hospitality, we begin by making a brief presentation of the dimensions of this concept and by problematizing multicultural hospitality with special attention to critical multiculturalism. Based on qualitative data, we then problematize hospitality with special attention to social relations and cultural discontinuities. Finally, we conclude with a discussion on guest and host factors in the concretization of multicultural hospitality with and for immigrants.

A small number of researchers are raising the relevance of reflexivity and researcher identities in tourism and hospitality scholarship. However, these discussions lack the practice of emotional labour triggered by researcher identities in tourism and hospitality organizational settings. Based on our shared organizational ethnography experience, we employ duoethnography to unveil the emotional labour and fluctuating researcher identities when navigating the subjective truths in conducting qualitative research as women of colour faculty on the tenure-track. This article advocates for the incorporation of researcher identities and emotional labour in reflexivity and challenges academic institutions to develop training around inclusive researcher identities and resultant emotional labour management.