Hospitality and prosumption

Abstract

Hospitality and the hospitality industry need to be reevaluated in the era of the new prosumer and smart prosuming machines. Traditional notions of hospitality hearken back to an earlier era and ongoing changes are forcing us to reconsider them. Among those changes are the decline of settings that offer hospitality; the decline of employment opportunities for workers in that industry; the decline in the opportunities to offer hospitality for the workers that remain; a decline in interest in hospitality on the part of consumers; the automation of hospitality; and the increasingly stratified nature of the hospitality industry. Overall, given the increasing affluence of the developed world, and of the elites in all parts of the world, the hospitality industry will survive. However, it will increasingly be bifurcated into a small number of settings that offer elites the kind of hospitality we traditionally associate with the industry and a vast majority of settings that offer what is best described as inhospitality to everyone else.

Keywords: Hospitableness, inhospitality, prosumption, smart prosuming machines, McDonaldisation