Hospitality & Society - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2017

In the Acts of the Apostles, St. Paul is shipwrecked on the shores of Malta, and through the welcome granted to him the archipelago’s inhabitants are converted to his new religion, while in The Odyssey, the sea nymph Calypso keeps Odysseus prisoner on Malta for seven years until freed by the gods. Tourists, refugees, expatriates, migrants, investors and ethnographers (not necessarily mutually exclusive and certainly not unproblematic categories) in Malta today find themselves caught in one or more junctures between these two poles of hospitality. For Derrida too hospitality is constituted by a double injunction, an aporia between the unconditional and the conditional, simultaneously mutually necessary and mutually contradictory. With these two accounts of divided hospitality in hand, and on the basis of fieldwork in Malta, this article explores the operations of multiple overlapping levels of political, social, cultural, economic, religious and ethnic conditions placed on hospitality, whether at the level of households, communities, States and so on. Particular attention is given to the ways in which such conditions do or do not manifest the inspiration and aspiration of unconditionality through what Derrida dubs ‘intermediate schemas’ between the conditional and the unconditional, as well as to defending the usefulness of the Derridean understanding of hospitality for ethnography.

This chapter explores notions and practices of hospitality among tourism workers in the Bulgarian coastal resort of Golden Sands. At its centre is the question whether it is justified to speak of hospitality in the context of service production in a mass tourism resort. Based on ethnographic data and building on Elizabeth Telfer’s notions of the good host and hospitableness, it investigates the provision of commercial hospitality in Golden Sands in the late socialist period and under the conditions of post-socialist mass tourism development. Practices of hospitality were markedly influenced by the transformation of the organization of tourism in the resort. Changes in the organization of labour and the post-socialist tourism boom had a profound effect on workers’ ability to be good hosts and to create moments of hospitableness in their daily interactions with tourists.

This article presents an analytical model that aims to conceptualize how meal experiences are framed when taking into account a dynamic understanding of hospitality: the meal model is named The Hospitable Meal Model. The idea behind The Hospitable Meal Model is to present a conceptual model that can serve as a frame for developing hospitable meal competencies among professionals working within the area of institutional foodservices as well as a conceptual model for analysing meal experiences. The Hospitable Meal Model transcends and transforms existing meal models by presenting a more open-ended approach towards meal experiences. The underlying purpose of The Hospitable Meal Model is to provide the basis for creating value for the individuals involved in institutional meal services. The Hospitable Meal Model was developed on the basis of an empirical study on hospital meal experiences explored through different epistemological positions and inspired by a sociomaterial assemblage approach. It frames an ontological position that considers meal experiences as dynamic, relational and socially constructed and supports the idea that meal experiences create different values and can be unpredictable.

This study is a systematic review of the literature on eWOM in hotels. Previous reviews of eWOM specific to the hotel and hospitality context have documented the state of research in the field but can be considered outdated, with the literature almost doubling since 2011. Emergent themes in the literature therefore need to be considered for us to identify gaps in knowledge and provide researchers opportunities for future study. Using systematic searches of articles published between 2000 and 2015, 45 journal articles were selected for the review, beginning in 2008. Our findings indicate eight research themes: (1) motivations for contributing to eWOM, (2) motivations for reading eWOM, (3) platforms used to facilitate eWOM, (4) ‘big data’ analytics and eWOM, (5) impact of eWOM on consumer behaviour, (6) impact on hotel performance, (7) hotel responses to eWOM, and (8) consumer cultural differences. We culminate these findings to provide a thematic framework of eWOM research in the hotel and hospitality industry, mapping the research relationships that have been established. We then provide areas for future researchers to develop.

Poverty Alleviation through Tourism Development: A Comprehensive and Integrated Approach, Robertico Croes and Manuel Rivera (2016) Waretown, NJ: Apple Academic Press, xxi + 246 pp., ISBN: 9781771881418, h/bk, £89.00

Sustainability in Hospitality: How Innovative Hotels are Transforming the Industry, Miguel Angel Gardetti and Anna Laura Torres (eds) (2016) Sheffield: Greenleaf Publishing Limited, vi + 263 pp., ISBN: 9781783532643, h/bk, £80.00

CSR and Sustainability: From the Margins to the Mainstream: A Textbook, Michael Hopkins (ed.) (2016) Sheffield: Greenleaf Publishing Limited, xxvii + 465 pp., ISBN: 9781783534463, h/bk, £80.00

The Seductions of Pilgrimage: Sacred Journeys Afar and Astray in the Western Religious Tradition, Michael A. Di Giovine and David Picard (eds) (2015) Farnham, Ashgate, ix + 266 pp., ISBN: 9781472440075, h/bk, £70.00

Tourism and National Identity: Heritage and Nationhood in Scotland, Kalyan Bhandari (2014) Bristol: Channel View, xiii + 154 pp., ISBN: 9781845414474, p/bk, £24.95