Hospitality and tourism industry is one of the largest industries in the world. This introductory course provides students with an overview of hospitality industry and segments of travel and tourism. Students are introduced to career opportunities and skills needed to succeed in the specific hospitality and tourism fields. Students examine the growth and development of industry segments and their distinguishing characteristics, current issues and trends. Students will learn about the interdependence of the various industry players and the roles of these diverse participants within the industry. The concepts and practices of hospitality management are examined and discussed.

This class includes an overview of hotel management from its opening to continuing operations. It focuses on the integrated functions of the front office, housekeeping, engineering, security, food & beverage, human resources, and accounting, as well as considering their roles individually. Students will apply revenue management principles (e.g., capacity management, duration control, demand and revenue forecasting), costing (e.g., budgeting, marginal costing, standard costing and variance analysis, labor accounting, balanced scorecard) and interpret hospitality financial statements (uniform system of accounts for lodging and restaurants) to understand and manage organizational performance. The course addresses foundational metrics and definitions used by the hotel industry and provides an opportunity to complete a certification exam (CHIA: Certification in Hotel Industry Analytics) by STR through the American Hotel and Lodging Educational Institute.

Enterprises in hospitality and tourism pass through many stages as they grow from a start-up to a mature organization. This course highlights what must be accomplished during each stage to ensure that hospitality business development is continued and sustainable. The critical point of the course is to give students an in-depth understanding of tools and skills necessary to create and grow a successful new tourism or hospitality enterprise with potential to expand. Students will actively discuss concepts and possible alternatives in operating hospitality- and tourism-based enterprises

The exceptional and changing nature of high-end tourism (experiential, emotional, authentic, individualized, etc.) suggests that luxury tourism professionals require a unique set of skills. As such, this course will provide students with the theoretic foundations to luxury service design, preparing them to operate in today’s luxury segment and enabling them to create and manage personalized experiences. Luxury service design is a holistic design process operating in the realm of constant uncertainty and change, i.e. chaos that arises from the contextual nature of personalized service and the ambition to solve problems that customers do not even know they have. Consequently, the chaos comes from the customers by default because they, by wanting personalization, resent standardization, which in turn means that organizations have to rearrange their stratagems in real time around what they hear from their clients. The luxury service design must therefore use skills from a variety of disciplines (design, psychology, management and process engineering) to develop models of co-creation of unique value with each individual customer, i.e. personalized experience in the process of continuous experiment. Tools like market analysis, active listening, analysis of customer behavior, mapping, heat-mapping, blueprinting, service marketing, complex service networks and imagineering will help to discern the new opportunities for value creation in the convergence of customers’ needs and desires, technological capabilities, and organizational innovations, taking customers beyond their current horizon of cognition.