About the Usefulness of Hospitality
On October 3rd Rohit Verma, Executive Director for the Cornell University Center for Hospitality Research (USA), gave a master class for students and lecturers of the HSE and other Moscow universities, as well as representatives of the hospitality business. He also had a meeting with the administration of the HSE Faculty of Management.
Rohit Verma is considered one of the most renowned researcher experts in organizational management in the hospitality industry. The Center for Hospitality Research (CHR) where Verma work as director is a leading global research institution with partners including global hotel networks (Hilton, Marriott, Hyatt and others), restaurant networks, online tourist companies, consulting agencies and software developers for the industry. They provide researchers with access to empirical data and order some analytical papers. Both the reports which are published at the CHR website and the records of interviews and discussions with businessmen are freely available.
The first part of Rohit Verma’s presentation was a review of key research trends in the global hospitality industry. The range of research areas covered at Cornell University is rather broad. In fact, what they do is transfer the solution of applied tasks faced by the hospitality organizations into the research dimension. This bond between academic institutions and business provides, on one hand, systemic development of the hospitality industry, and on the other – a high standard of education in this sphere.
In his lecture Prof. Verma also spoke about how modern mobile technologies have altered the character of services in the hospitality industry. In particular, communication between key market participants, such as hotels, and the consumers of hotel services is changing radically. The use of ICT in the hospitality business is the focus of one of the CHR’s key studies – ‘How Travelers Use Online and Social Media Channels to Make Hotel-choice Decisions’. In the second part of his speech, Prof. Verma spoke about the high demand from the business community for the results of such a study, as well as about its aims, design and methods.
One of CHR’s partners in this study is the HSE Faculty of Management. During Rohit Verma’s meeting with the faculty’s working group the practical results of the first stage of the study were discussed and the main directions for implementing the final stage of the project were defined. In addition to this, some other forms of academic cooperation between the HSE Faculty of Management and the CHR were discussed in greater detail.
Another important result of the visit was a discussion carried out by Prof. Verma and the developers of the planned HSE master’s programme ‘Economics of Impressions: Management in Hospitality Industry and Tourism’. They talked about its concept, curriculum and an idea for a research seminar. Finally, Rohit Verma also looked at the programme supported by Cornell University and outlined its strengths and areas for further development.
Oleg Seregin, HSE News Service
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