An analysis of international employment levels in hospitality occupations using secondary statistics

Abstract

Frequent claims are made for the importance of the hospitality industry, and wider tourism sector, as potential and actual creators of employment. Many of these claims emanate from industry representative and advocacy organizations, often as part of their legitimate efforts to lobby governments for favourable treatment of their sectors. Good quality universal statistical data on employment in hospitality are noticeable by their absence, although information collected by bodies such as the International Labour Organization is extensive. This paper reviews the current state of data availability on global hospitality employment (with a primary focus on commercial hospitality operations) and seeks to employ these secondary sources in investigating the question as to whether we can in fact make plausible statements about the extent of such employment. This exercise is important both to contextualizing claims made for the employment generating capacity of the hospitality industry and to shedding light on the degree of seriousness with which data might be treated in wider policy contexts. The paper concludes, with cautious optimism, that commercial hospitality is a significant global employer and that the claims made for this employment by representative and advocacy organizations are plausible if treated with circumspection.

An Analysis of Foodservice and Accommodation Industry in Europe Using Secondary Statistics

“…Frequent claims are made for the importance of the hospitality industry, and wider tourism one, as potential and actual creators of employment. Many of these claims emanate from industry representative and advocacy organizations, often as part of their legitimate efforts 59 AN ANALYSIS OF FOODSERVICE AND ACCOMMODATION Edyta Gheribi Alessandro Bonadonna to lobby governments for favorable treatment of their industries (Koens and Wood, 2017).…”

Tourism industry career prospects and the business environment: Evidence from Canada and Macau

“…In forming a realistic impression of tourism and hospitality employment opportunities, it is important to have a true picture or the numbers in work. A recent paper by Koens and Wood () has provided a preliminary quantification by country and territory by mining a wide range of official statistics. They concluded that hospitality accounts for 4.6% of employment in Asia and 6.9% in North America.…”

El turismo y el alivio de la pobreza: un enfoque desde el prisma de los destinos emergentes en el marco de la Agenda 2030

“…Ambas fuentes son utilizadas con frecuencia por la comunidad académica, sea para realizar un tratamiento estadístico de manera directa con estos datos (Hanafiah et al, 2016;Simas et al, 2017), o como información complementaria al análisis que realizan (Arshad et al, 2018;Koens & Wood, 2017). Por tanto, estas fuentes han sido escogidas atendiendo tanto a la consistencia de los datos, como a la normalización en la metodología de recopilación y almacenamiento.…”