Dark Hospitality : Hotels As Places For The End Of Life

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This paper will discuss on the journal article “Dark hospitality: hotels as places for the end of life”. It investigated around the reasons of people selecting to die in hotels and whether hotels should provide ‘dark’ service for them through a series of interviews of relevant experienced hotels’ employees. Moreover, author indicated a new possible direction of hospitality industry: developing hospice hotel in the future. Qualitative method was the fundamental methodology of the journal article. The major formation of research was purposive sampling approach which pursued 14 in-depth interviews to 4 senior managers and 10 housekeepers (30 to 45 mins for each) at 4 four-star or five-star hotels in a city of a Northern European country. Furthermore, it did not have any record for interviews and all were carried out by 1 person (Hay, 2015). The findings of the study were divided into 7 sections. Section1 reflected reasons of clients choose ending their lives in hotels. Based on the interviewees’ descriptions, they were classified into emotional elements and practical factors (Hay, 2015). Section 2 & 3 respectively focused on the emotional effects for the hotels’ staff and practically existing influence for hotels’ management. Some respondents expressed customers’ death provoking their consideration on their lives, they felt cherishing their family more. Moreover, relevant management issues were not ignored, such as handling dead’s grieved relatives, hangover and deep cleaning of the room, etc. After that, section 4 referred to relevant financial procedures issues (Hay, 2015). Section 5 discussed about the relevant support from HR for housekeepers. It displayed a consistent point from junior housekeepers and senior managers t... ... middle of paper ... ...ial topic with a lot of negative criticisms, as Brian Hay (2015, p.244) said in the journal article: It could also be argued that the development of luxury hospice hotels is a natural development of the retirement village or nursing home that offers a new product for the hospitality sector, albeit one with distinct ethical challenges, but one that takes hospitality back to its original roots. Market testing of the hospice hotel concept would help to assess the demand of this market segment. Hospitality represents internationalization. Under the multicultural board environment, practitioners have to consider more to care about guests’ perception. For the future of hospitality, it really possesses various possibilities. However, in the process of advance, any tentative suggestion should be carried out cautiously after overall and objective assessing the feasibility.

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