This paper focuses on the neglect of an employment or workforce focus in policy engagement and planning for sustainable tourism. Tourism is of interest here because there is an established role for government and the private sector in policy engagement and strategic planning with respect to product development, infrastructure, marketing and human resource capacity and the focus has increasingly emphasised sustainable goals within this process. The discussion addresses the central role of people and work within concepts of sustainability and sustainable communities and questions why this has been, substantially, ignored in tourism. The paper starts by recognising the interconnectedness of employment in tourism and its workforce concerns with a wide range of inter-linked policy and operational considerations. This, in turn, points to the utility of the sustainable HRM model as a means by which to frame tourism work. Thereafter, this paper introduces new approaches through the proposal of sustainability indicators that have both theoretical and practical policy formation value in relation to the workforce. These sustainable employment capacity, service delivery capacity and service quality capacity with which policy-makers can gauge their readiness for sustainable growth in tourism employment. The research and application implications for this approach are discussed.

This paper is about the position of workforce and employment considerations within the sustainable tourism narrative. The paper aims to address the relative neglect of this area within the discourse of sustainable tourism and highlights references to the workforce within the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The discussion follows the emerging field of sustainable human resource management and the contribution that this can make to meeting both the UN Sustainable Development Goals and to enhancing the recognition of workforce and employment issues within the related debate in tourism. The body of the paper highlights examples of key dimensions of work and employment across varied tourism contexts, where sustainability is of increasing consequence and significance. The paper concludes by drawing together the implications of these “mini-cases” and locating them within key principles of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The role of skills and skills development through training in the contemporary economy is a matter of considerable academic and political debate. Public policy in many countries focuses on the development, through training, of what are seen as a high skills employment and business environment (Brown et al, 2001). At the same time, most developed or high skills economies also depend to a significant extent on an alternative economy based on what are loosely and pejoratively described as ‘low skills’ jobs. Little critical analysis has been undertaken with respect to what such descriptors actually mean. This article addresses one sector of the ‘low skills’ economy, hospitality. This article considers skills issues in relation to the hospitality sector. It draws upon the work of Noon & Blyton (1995) in applying their approach to the classification and analysis of skills within hospitality. The article also draws on Ashton & Green's (1996) critique of vocational education as a basis for understanding some of the problems inherent in skills development in hospitality. The article addresses the skills debate in hospitality in four key theme areas: the nature of work and skills in hospitality; de-skilling within the hospitality workplace; the technical/generic skills debate within hospitality; skills and the education/training process in hospitality.

This study proposes and tests a tour service performance framework that assesses the impact of tour service performance on tourists’ satisfaction with tour services and experience as well as their behavioral intentions, based on data collected from 580 Chinese tourists participating in package tours in Hong Kong. All of the scales used were pretested and refined using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The results show that satisfaction with tour services and satisfaction with the tour experience are distinct constructs with differential relationships with the various tour services. Among the seven tour services examined, tour guiding service has the greatest impact on satisfaction with tour services, whereas leisure activities have the greatest impact on satisfaction with the tour experience. The results also suggest that behavioral intentions are determined by tour guide service and tourist satisfaction. The methodology employed allows a comprehensive and focused evaluation of all services included in package tours.

Hotels are diverse and constantly evolving, changing over time, inter alia, in their shape and appearance, their size, purpose, location and, perhaps above all, their representation of luxury and comfort. These changes have been and, intuitively, will continue to be driven by a complex amalgam of drivers. Representations that depict hotels of the future accommodate the consequences of change in varying ways – design, service, interaction with systems and technology among other considerations. This article is concerned less with the consumer and the physical properties of the establishment but rather seeks to focus consideration primarily on the possible changing roles of service workers within various conceptions of what hotels in the future may look like through to 2030 and beyond. The article applies a qualitative approach involving a literature review and subsequent Delphi method to develop and examine in depth three key drivers affecting the roles and skills of employees in hotels of the future. The attendant alternative workforce implications of each are discussed in turn.