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In an effort to understand the base differences between tourism and hospitality academic programmes, it is important to understand their philosophical relationships. Different types of philosophies will give rise to different orientations. The differential orientations often lead to conflicts. These conflicts are not usually understood in terms of basic philosophical differences, but are seen as a perceptual distinction. This translates to the real world in that many tourism and hospitality professionals have strong feelings about each other that lead to professional misunderstandings. These differences in philosophy also have important ramifications for curricula, course structure, or the instructional philosophies. The purpose of this article is to examine the philosophical relationships between tourism and hospitality academic programmes and their implications, especially for curricular design. This type of philosophical modelling will help obtain a better perspective on the design of courses that have a general thematic structure to improve the preparations programmes in tourism and hospitality.

This paper aims to provide answers to the question: “What innovations would enable the tourism and hospitality industry to re-build?”.

At the outset, it redefines the concept of ‘Innovation” in the context of the hospitality and tourism industry. It then focuses on post-pandemic re-building best practices in tourism and hospitality. It captures the essence of the articles in this theme issue collection on innovative actions from around the world and presents concluding remarks.

This article summarises the key findings of this theme issue and it draws generalized conclusions about re-building the tourism and hospitality industry. In conclusion, 14 key learning outcomes are presented. These include topics such as: rethinking tourism and hospitality products and services, sustaining resilience, collaboration between the government, academia and industry, special interest tourism, domestic tourism, crisis management, digital transformation, the health and safety of all stakeholders, operational efficiencies and environmental sustainability.

This research contributes to the emerging research theme of tourism and hospitality post-pandemic re-building.

There are a number of practical implications in terms of industry approaches to the adoption of innovative strategies to re-build tourism and hospitality operations around the world.

Readers who are interested in international best practices of hospitality and tourism should find this concluding article of interest.

The purpose of this paper is to present a briefing on milestones of Malaysia Centre of Tourism and Hospitality Education (MyCenTHE) regarding its role as a nation-building exercise in developing human capital talent for future sustainable hospitality and tourism in Malaysia. Under a national initiative by the ministry of education, hospitality and tourism educational institutes in the country have set out to better prepare graduates for industry. MyCenTHE aspires to build a hospitality and tourism cluster (threefold) so that Malaysia is able to increase its annual output of hospitality and tourism personnel from 20,000 in 2009 to 50,000 in 2020 and increase the share of graduates with diploma- or degree-level awards from 13% to 50% by 2020. These expectations can only be achieved by creating a sustainable pool of workers for this sector. It was in this context for which “MyCenTHE” was conceived.

The current study is based on documentary analysis of secondary sources, qualitative in nature, and presents a case study of MyCenTHE with its key accomplishments in promoting hospitality and tourism education in Malaysia.

The hospitality and tourism industry in Malaysia is set to create 600,000 new job opportunities and in so doing, will need many more skilled, work-ready graduates in the coming decade. This paper highlights the collective efforts of the private higher education sector together with some selected public institutions (polytechnics) under the umbrella of the ministry of education through the MyCenTHE platform in promoting hospitality and tourism education nationwide via national awareness campaigns, conferences, skill competitions, seminars, forums and corporate social responsibility projects.

This paper is of value in its own context and in particular support from ministry and related authorities, 26 institutions of higher education working together, approaches to hundreds of local schools and thousands of audiences/participants in awareness campaigns.

The purpose of this paper is to profile the Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes theme issue “The way forward: how is Malaysian hospitality and tourism education working with industry?” with reference to the experiences of the theme editors and writing team.

Structured questions were used to enable the theme editors to reflect on the rationale for the theme issue question, the starting point, the selection of the writing team and material and the editorial process.

Malaysia’s hospitality and tourism industry is facing an acute shortage of skilled employees, accentuated by the fact that jobs in the industry are not broadly appealing to Malaysians.

The hospitality and tourism industry in Malaysia wants to employ graduates with a professional attitude and mindset, and to secure this objective, a greater focus on work-based learning is needed.

The paper draws on discussion and applied research to explore the hospitality and tourism industry–education collaboration in Malaysia and the ways in which employability and retention can be enhanced by a greater emphasis on work-based learning.

The purpose of this paper is to explore some of the ways in which hospitality and tourism education in Malaysia is working with the Malaysian Industry 4.0 framework.

A qualitative research approach was used to conduct 30 interviews with respondents working for academic institutions and local or foreign companies.

The analysis of data helped to identify themes relating to current foreign partnerships within this area of industry.

Through the resolution of this research question, specific recommendations for policymakers and stakeholders are made, which, if implemented, may facilitate further improvements in tourism and hospitality education in support of industry in Malaysia.

This cutting-edge short commentary is intended to raise awareness of sex trafficking in the tourism and hospitality industry. The purpose of this paper is to also advocate for further research to identify and hopefully prevent sex trafficking in related settings.

This paper provides a descriptive overview of the current knowledge base on sex trafficking in tourism and hospitality. Based on gaps in the literature, future research agendas and directions are suggested.

Academic research on sex trafficking in tourism and hospitality remains limited. More scholarly attention is needed to this matter. The tourism industry is directly and indirectly associated with sex trafficking (e.g. hotel accommodations and direct consumption of sexual services, such as through sex tourism). Despite legislative efforts by international government agencies to eradicate sex trafficking, the problem remains pervasive. Broader practice- and research-based intervention efforts are needed.

This short commentary advocates for tourism and hospitality researchers to make practical and theoretical industry contributions that may help prevent sex trafficking.

This study presents a bibliometric analysis of hospitality and tourism literature related to the COVID-19 pandemic, categorizing the pandemic into five phases: inception, growth, maturity, endemic and new normal.

Using the Web of Science database, 2,485 publications from Q1 and Q2 journals of the SCImago Journal and Country Rank, published from January 2020 to July 2024, were analyzed. Advanced bibliometric techniques, including co-word analysis and structural topic modeling, were employed to trace research trends and theoretical frameworks.

The study identifies key publications, authors and affiliations. It also highlights evolving research themes across different pandemic phases. The analysis reveals a dynamic shift from immediate impacts to recovery, resilience and sustainability. The study also discusses the diverse theoretical approaches used to understand pandemic-related behaviors, emphasizing the importance of health and risk theories.

Findings point to ways in which businesses may adapt and diversify their business models to be more resilient to future health-related crises. The findings further emphasize the importance of promoting sustainable and responsible tourism practices, as well as supporting employee well-being.

The findings offer valuable insights for future research and practical implications for the hospitality and tourism sectors in preparing for potential future pandemics by reviewing the entire progress of the pandemic.

This paper aims to provide insights into service innovation (SI) during the COVID-19 crisis and its potential impact on tourism development in the medium-to-long term. The pandemic had a devastating effect on the industry, requiring immediate mitigation. It is yet to fully establish the impact of SI in the face of the COVID-19 volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA). This study discusses the potential link between SI and COVID-19 crisis mitigation and offers recommendations for tourism recovery.

This paper synthesizes empirical evidence on post-crisis tourism SI using a theory-based general literature review approach.

COVID-19 crisis spun various forms of SI, which emerged as a conventional solution to crisis prevention, encompassing the management of crisis-time competitiveness, revenue deficits and risk perception. However, resistance to innovative services is linked to situational conditions.

COVID-19 is an unprecedented crisis. Therefore, this study serves as a primer for further inquiry into SI. For instance, areas such as governance in tourism innovation and consumers' inclination toward innovation-driven services are underexplored.

SI acts as a situational facilitator, but its characteristics can impede or facilitate adoption. Moreover, the irrelevance of innovations in some environments is evidenced. Thus, practitioners must adopt a responsive learning approach in SI adoption. To mitigate the COVID-19 impacts, reconfiguration in SI, recovery marketing strategy, knowledge gap and governance will be critical interventions.

This paper is one of the first comprehensive discussions on the potential role of SI in mitigating the impact of COVID-19 on the THI.

With the disruptive evolution of artificial intelligence (AI), the roles of robotics in hospitality and tourism are shifting rapidly from automatic to emotional works. Although academics have focused on examining robotic applications in hospitality and tourism, concrete images of the different roles of robots are unclear. Thus, this study aims to systematically aggregate and evaluate existing robotic technology-related studies published in Social Science Citation Index-listed hospitality and tourism journals to link the fragmented knowledge and provide an up-to-date overview of robotic technology in hospitality and tourism.

This study retrieved 134 robotic technology-related articles and used descriptive and content analyses to analyze the retrieved papers thoroughly.

The top keyword identified was service robot. Robotic technologies are categorized into AI-supplemented, AI-generated, robotic technology anthropomorphism (RTA)-facilitated and RTA-mediated.

Future studies can consider exploring service robots further from the perspectives of suppliers in tourism. A more comprehensive categorization of robotic technologies is also recommended.

This study contributes to the robotic research realm by providing a holistic view of robotic applications in hospitality and tourism research. This study also attempts to pin down the potential research directions to guide researchers in expanding future studies.

随着人工智能（AI）的颠覆性发展, 机器人在酒店和旅游业中的角色正迅速从自动化工作转变为情感性工作。尽管学术界已开始研究机器人在酒店和旅游业中的应用, 但对于机器人不同角色的具体图像仍不清晰。本研究系统性地汇总并评估了发表在社会科学引文索引（SSCI）列出的酒店与旅游期刊中的现有机器人技术相关研究, 以连接零散的知识, 并提供关于酒店与旅游业机器人技术的最新概览。

本研究检索了134篇与机器人技术相关的文章, 并采用描述性分析和内容分析方法对检索到的文章进行了深入分析。

最常见的关键词是服务机器人。机器人技术分为AI辅助、AI生成、机器人技术拟人化(RTA)促进和RTA中介。

未来的研究可以考虑从旅游供应商的角度进一步探索服务机器人。还建议对机器人技术进行更全面的分类。

本研究通过提供酒店与旅游研究中机器人应用的整体视角, 丰富了机器人研究领域。本研究还尝试明确潜在的研究方向, 为未来的研究扩展提供指导。

This chapter offers an experience-based report about the development of the first Scandinavian PhD program in tourism studies at Mid-Sweden University. This process is documented through a framework which, rather than having the coherence of a single clearly bounded discipline, focuses on tourism as a study area encompassing multiple disciplines. Tourism knowledge is derived through a synthesis of fact-oriented positivist methodologies and critical theory. The theoretical framework employed to develop the graduate program in tourism studies is presented by critically discussing its multidisciplinary base and briefly outlining future veins of further development.