Hospitality Talents Future

This project is part of a PhD study that sees hospitality as a moral laboratory for the future of work. It explores how technological innovation, staff shortages, and ongoing crises are changing the role of the human host. It also looks at what it truly means to work in hospitality today. The research produces concrete ideas and practical tools for organisations and educational institutions. This helps work remain ethical, meaningful, and mentally sustainable. Even in a world that is increasingly automated and uncertain.

What is the motivation for the project?

The hospitality sector is at a turning point. Automation, staff shortages, and overlapping crises are changing how work is experienced. Public debates often focus separately on technology, job insecurity, ethics, or wellbeing. In practice, these forces come together in the daily work of employees. At the same time, a new generation of workers seeks meaningful work, psychological safety, and organisations with clear ethical values. Many organisations are introducing AI systems that do not always meet these expectations. There is a growing need for an integrated understanding of how human presence, care, and professional identity can be maintained in a data-driven, crisis-sensitive world. This project goes beyond operational or economic perspectives. It sees hospitality as a field where technology, justice, and human dignity intersect in practical organisational and educational decisions.

What problem does the project solve?

The project focuses on three closely linked challenges:

Talent management in hospitality is often reduced to filling vacancies. Employees’ sense of purpose, identity, and safety are overlooked, even though these are crucial for retaining and motivating staff.
AI and algorithmic systems increasingly take over tasks such as recruitment, scheduling, and service delivery, without considering the ethical, relational, or psychological impact on employees.
Luxury and crisis care are usually treated separately. This creates a gap between commercialised hospitality for affluent guests and essential care for vulnerable groups.

To address these challenges, the project introduces three core ideas:

Identity-focused talent management – recognising employees in their full human dimension.
Humanitarian Hospitality Framework – for hospitality in crisis settings.
Anticipatory Well-being Framework – placing psychological sustainability at the centre.

Together, these concepts provide a holistic diagnosis and practical tools for a hospitality sector that is human-centred, resilient, and future-ready.

Who are in the project team?

The project is led by Georges El Hajal, a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen and Senior Lecturer and Researcher at the Hotel Management School Leeuwarden. It brings together a series of studies and publications developed in collaboration with several colleagues and co-authors. These include Erwin Losekoot (Gen Z talent management and employee well-being), Ian Yeoman (AI and the future of talent management), Stanislav Ivanov (generative AI, strategic foresight, and the idea of humans as the ultimate luxury), and Rodney Westerlaken and Erwin Losekoot (humanitarian hospitality).

What is the project approach?

The project uses a multi-method, multi-paper design. It combines qualitative focus groups and workshops with Generation Z stakeholders, strategic foresight and scenario planning on AI-driven talent systems, comparative experiments with generative AI, and conceptual and ethical analysis of both luxury and humanitarian hospitality contexts. Each study is published or prepared as an academic article or book chapter, with the thesis bringing them together into one coherent theoretical framework.

Methodologically, the project takes an interpretivist and futures-oriented approach. It views the future of hospitality work as open and ethically shaped, rather than technologically predetermined. Strategic foresight is used both as a research method and as a teaching tool to explore alternative futures of work. Across the studies, the project develops and refines four key frameworks: Identity Stewardship, the Humanitarian Hospitality Framework, the Anticipatory Well-being Framework, and the Resilient Human Presence Integrative Framework.

What are the main (or prelimanary) results?

The project delivers four main sets of results. Empirically, it shows that Gen Z hospitality workers value psychological safety, ethical alignment, and a sense of ontological security, and that labour shortages are driven not only by numbers, but by questions of meaning and identity. Systemically, it demonstrates how AI is reshaping talent management and futures thinking, while exposing the epistemic limits of generative AI and the continued need for human ethical oversight.

Conceptually, the project introduces Identity Stewardship, the Humans-as-Luxury lens, and the Humanitarian Hospitality Framework to explain how human presence is commodified in luxury contexts and reasserted as an ethical responsibility in crisis settings. Psychologically, it develops the Anticipatory Well-being Framework, framing well-being as a forward-looking capability rather than a reactive measure.

Integrated within the Resilient Human Presence Framework, these results provide guidance for organisations, educators, and policymakers seeking to design hospitality systems that remain ethical, meaningful, and sustainable in times of automation and disruption.