Eat, Sleep, Fly, Repeat: Meal Patterns Among Swedish Business Travelers

Abstract

Over half of the annual guests at Swedish hotels are supplied by the corporate sector. These guests are made up of individuals who travel for meetings, conferences, or presentations as a part of their job. Access to meals while travelling is essential and introduces added complexity to business travelers' everyday lives. These meals, and the pattern in which they are consumed, are part of the individual traveler's personal and group identities. Therefore, the aim of this article is to study if business travelers deviate from their habitual meal patterns and, if so, what changes they make. To further the understanding of this group's meal patterns, a questionnaire was created and distributed. It was answered by 538 self-identified business travelers. These business travelers were made up of three groups: solo travelers, group travelers, and individuals who traveled both in groups as well as alone. Pearson's chi-squared test was used to analyze differences in actions related to the meal pattern between groups. The analysis showed that changes in the meal pattern did occur in some instances. However, the majority of the business travelers adhered to their habitual meal pattern while adjusting their behavior depending on the time of day. Managers of catering suppliers gaining insight into the meal habits of business travelers could help to ease an otherwise stressful situation by supplying meals, as a context, that fit with the business traveler's habitual patterns and meal contexts.

Social lens or inherently social phenomenon? The study of food in Swedish sociology

“…Some further indications of sociology's relevance to food-specialised research are the publication of the first introductory book on sociological perspectives on food in Swedish (Neuman, 2019a), the continued use of sociological theory in doctoral dissertations from food-specialised departments (e.g. Rendahl, 2018;Scander, 2019;Sundqvist, 2020), and the continued development of Swedish food studies in the direction of encouraging synergies between sociology and interdisciplinary research (Motta and Martín, 2021;Neuman, 2019b;Poulain, 2017) rather than the separation of sociology and food studies prevalent in the UK (Boni, 2019;Warde, 2016).…”

“…Bengs, who holds Sweden’s only chair with an explicitly food-sociological orientation, is the only scholar in the sample who is engaged in food sociology even though her dissertation treated food as a social lens. We marked her as ‘yes’, although her research output on food topics is limited to just one article (Sundqvist and Bengs, 2021), co-authored with her previous PhD candidate as a part of his dissertation (Sundqvist, 2020). Her engagement with food sociology might thus primarily be guided by an interest in what food tells us about other social phenomena, and the lion’s share of her publications do not concern food.…”

Meal identity as practice - Towards an understanding of business travellers’ meal practices

“…To handle this emerged complexity business travellers are known to create strategies to handle their work life, e.g. by minimising the time they spend at a destination ( Gustafson, 2012b ), trying to manage family life while being away from home ( Lassen, 2010 ; Saarenpää, 2016 ), or by adapting their meal patterns while travelling to better suit their situation and situational identity ( Sundqvist et al, 2020 ).…”