We - Marte Rinck de Boer and Klaes Eringa - visited the above-mentioned conference to present our AIHR based research (via posters), to network, and to inform ourselves about the variety of themes in hospitality and tourism research.

The conference, which was hosted by the Hongkong Polytechnic University school of Hospitality and Tourism, was organised around the theme East meets West in Hospitality & Tourism Education. This theme was reflected in the around 750 delegates coming from all over the world. The Dutch hotel schools were well represented, and we had good opportunities to strengthen our connection with our Dutch colleagues. Furthermore, we met colleagues from Qatar the dean Ivan Ninov and quality assurance coordinator Gulbahar Abdallah. We also ran into Vanessa de Oliveira Menezes who works with our professor Elena Cavagnaro this year as a post doc researcher.

Next to the many stand up presentations (for instance on relation of internship characteristics and retention; feminist research; emotional labour; event management to mention a few), we attended an interesting workshop on design thinking provided by our Breda UAS colleague Geoff Marée.

Klaes presented his research on the attractiveness of the hospitality industry that he conducts with Ran Zhang. Klaes also made contact with several colleagues from hotel schools in Germany who offered to cooperate in this research.

Marte Rinck presented the Master thesis research on emotional labour and work values that won the 2018 scriptie prijs. Marte Rinck received positive reactions and was happy to hear that our Qatar colleague Gulbahar currently writes her Phd on the role of female emotional labour. We decided to explore and start a joint project on the topic our interest as of September.

During the conference, we stayed at Hotel ICON, the training hotel of Hongkong Polytechnic University . Hotel ICON has 262 rooms and is ranked #3 of 283 hotels in Hong Kong on TripAdvisor. We were impressed by the provided service and hospitableness of staff, by the teaching and research possibilities at the campus. We noticed, however, that students only play a minor role in running the hotel.

The first evening Klaes decided to eat the vegetarian IMPOSSIBLE BURGER in one of the restaurants of Hotel ICON. I was impressed and when I returned to my room I noticed a hand written welcome note from the GM:

I decided to mail him and ask if I could take home some patties of ”the impossible burger”, so I could share them with Albert Kooy. Within the hour I received the following mail:

Dear Klaes,
Thanks for the feedback.
I have copied Susana Fork our Director of rooms who will touch base and see how we can help. The Impossible burgers are delivered as a mass of frozen ‘meat’ our chef shapes them and weighs each one. I suggest we let you have a couple of frozen ones and we can pack them in a freezer bag for the journey home. You may want to check if there are any import restrictions in your country. 
I did check that seat, seafood, vegetables and other non-liquid food items are permitted in both carry-on and checked bags. If the food is packed with ice or ice packs in a cooler or other container, the ice or ice packs must be completely frozen when brought through screening.
Susana will arrange with the Chef.
Thanks
Richard

Last week Albert Kooy organised the preparation of the burgers and a tasting for practical instructors at Stenden Hotel. Albert seemed to enjoy working with the burgers; he used the word research in every other sentence. The practical instructors enjoyed the burgers and were completely fooled by both taste and bite and texture.

Albert’s main objection to the burger is that the main ingredient is soy protein which is neither local, nor very sustainable. So there is room for the development of our own vegetarian Stenden burger, possibly on the basis of lupin bean which is grown locally in Friesland. Plenty of opportunity for further research and development.

Marte Rinck de Boer and Klaes Eringa

De Boer, M.R., Visser, H.L. & Eringa, K. (2019). Meeting hospitality employees at their work place: Emotional labor and work values of Generation Y. Poster presented at EuroCHRIE/APacCHRIE joint conference: When East meets West, 22-25 May, Hong Kong PolyU, HKSAR, China.

Eringa, K. & Zhang, R. (2019). The attractiveness of the hospitality industry. Poster presented at EuroCHRIE/APacCHRIE joint conference: When East meets West, 22-25 May, Hong Kong PolyU, HKSAR, China.