engleski

Tradition of Hospitality, taken as a Quality Element of Tourism

Research shows hospitality to be one of the attractive elements of a tourist destination, which therefore makes it one of the key quality elements of tourism and hotel industry. Hospitality and amiability belong to important definers of the particular system envisaged to measure and evaluate how satisfied guests are with the hotel services offered, that is what is the quality of experiencing a tourist destination. Hospitality is particularly important for a sustainable development of any tourist destination since it favours all the key elements of a destination system: the visitors, the natives, the investors. Many hotel firms resort to training and other systematic forms of education in order to “ teach” , that is to “ drill” their employees into acquiring a higher quality level when communicating with their guests, into displaying a higher level of hospitality and amiability. However, is hospitality something one can learn or acquire? To what measure can the employees be drilled and so learn to be hospitable? Are there parts of the world where hospitality “ just goes without saying” ? Can the various regions, nations and mentalities be distinguished by the level of hospitality they manifest? The authors of the present paper try to shed light upon the phenomenon of hospitality by inquiring into its origins and tradition. They delve into the importance of hospitality in ancient civilizations, the religious dimension of hospitality, examine the phenomenon of hospitality as an important component of our notion of the Balkans and sketch the power relations within the phenomenon of hospitality, in the light of the current postcolonial theory. To round up the survey is a conclusion on the positive ethical and political potential of hospitality, as well as of hospitality understood as an exceptional tourist potential. It is the wish of this paper to stimulate further research of the phenomenon of hospitality, as a specific sociological phenomenon of a tourist destination that considerably marks it.

hospitality; hospitality in the Bible; tradition of hospitality; hospitality as a quality element of tourism

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