Purpose: This paper aims to stimulate the discussion in the fields of hospitality, tourism and leisure on what exactly constitutes “an experience” and how to measure it; the authors unpack the experience construct into its core constituent elements, namely, emotions.Design/methodology/approach: The paper reviews insights from psychology and cognitive neuroscience that define experiences as a fine-grained temporal succession of emotions that occur during an experiential episode. Limitations of current methods for measuring experiences are discussed, after which biometric and neuroscientific methods are reviewed that are optimally geared toward measuring emotions, as they occur during an experience with fine temporal detail.Findings: An overview is presented of the available studies within the fields of hospitality, tourism and leisure that use these methodologies. These studies show that using these methodologies provides a fruitful methodological approach to measuring experiences in real time.Practical implications: Companies are constantly seeking to create memorable experiences for their customers. The proposed research methodologies allow companies to get a more fine-grained image of what impacts customers over the course of their experience and to actively integrate the use of emotions into creating experiences, as emotions are key to making them memorable.Originality/value: The paper sketches the contours of a rapidly emerging framework that unpacks memorable experiences into their constituent element – emotions. It is proposed that this will contribute to a deeper understanding of how consumers experience offerings in the hospitality, tourism and leisure industry.

Purpose: Automation poses to change how service work is organized. However, there is a lack of understanding of how automation influences specific sectors, including specific hospitality jobs. Addressing this gap, this paper looks at the relative automatability of jobs and tasks which fall within one specific hospitality context: frontline food service.Design/methodology/approach: Study 1 analyzes the UK Office for National Statistics' Standard Occupational Classification (2020) data to determine the degree to which frontline food service jobs consist of tasks requiring mechanical, analytical, intuitive or empathetic intelligence. Study 2 contrasts these findings to current state of intelligent automation technology development through interviews and a focus group with food service technology experts (n = 13).Findings: Of all the tasks listed under food service in the ONS SOC 2020, 58.8% are found to require mechanical, 26.8% analytical, 11.3% intuitive and 3.1% empathetic intelligence. Further, the automatability of these tasks is found to be driven by three streams of technology development in particular: (1) autonomous navigation, (2) object manipulation and (3) natural language processing.Originality/value: Hospitality management literature has started to conceptualize a move from mechanical and analytical service tasks to tasks centered around intuition and empathy. While previous studies have adopted a general view to what this might mean for hospitality jobs, this paper develops a novel, task-centric framework for Actioning Intelligent Automation in Frontline Food Service.

Reports from the UN World Tourism Organization, the World Travel and Tourism Council, the European Travel Commission, Amadeus, and other similar organizations are all unanimous, the future of tourism and hospitality is prosperous. Tourism destinations and hotels have suffered paradigmatic shifts from Fordist to post-Fordist and then to neo-Fordist modes of production and consumption. The current century is bringing us new neo-Fordist forms of hotel businesses, and due to the industry’s steady growth, more and more companies are required to develop new perspectives in order to stay relevant and to gain competitive advantage in the various fragmented markets. In an era of impermanency and fluidity, destinations and their businesses are forced to be dynamic and innovative. Considering the current and unforeseen developments in technology, consumption, management and operations, the hotel of tomorrow will not be incrementally but radically different from today. In this context, this article focuses on describing, interpreting and anticipating the changes the hotel industry is expected to face in the coming years. The study uses service design approach and various data collection instruments such as e-Delphi and Lego^® Serious Play^® to depict how the hotel of the future will be. Involving current and future hospitality and tourism professionals, this study synthesizes three possible scenarios, thus portraying a foresight into the hotel of the future.