In the knowledge-based digital economy the ability to harness digital technologies to capture and manage information is a critical skill for tourism professionals. This article examines the use of wikis as a teaching and learning tool to help students develop a range of knowledge management skills, including creative collaboration, consensus-building and technical literacy. The purpose of the study is to provide an exploratory analysis of student attitudes toward the use of wikis as a collaborative assessment task. The results indicate that wikis are perceived to be a flexible, convenient and fair pedagogical technique for collaborative learning. Many students readily understood and exploited the collaborative and reflective nature of wikis. However, some students did not spend enough time on the task and did not appear to gain as much from the learning experience. This impacted on the extent and quality of collaboration in some groups. It is suggested that a staged wiki assessment might overcome some of the perceived shortcomings reported by students.

Mass customisation (MC) is a well-established paradigm in many sectors of industry. The reason for this study was that flight catering appeared to be the first sector of the hospitality industry to be adopting MC. There was a prima facie case that it was introducing many of the features of mass customised products and services — agile manufacturing, lean production, just-in-time inventory, modularity, and flexible labour practices. In particular, the specific MC mode (MacCarthy, Brabazon, & Bramham, 2003) adopted by this industry is identified as ‘flexible resource call-off MC’ and is established as a model of the operational process with the flight catering industry. The research concludes that although most elements of mass customisation are evident in flight catering, the MC paradigm has not been fully adopted.

One of the essential aims of service process organisation is to increase the added value for the customer, thereby increasing customer satisfaction and stimulating consumption. In a haute-cuisine context, customers typically have a higher degree of uncertainty as they often lack the experience of receiving and judging quality in a haute-cuisine setting. This article reports on the application of service process organisation in a haute-cuisine restaurant. The case study shows that there is a significant need to reduce back office activities so that interaction with the customer or customer-facing processes can be increased. This can increase the added value for the customer and can result in higher profits for the restaurants as the customer is either willing to pay higher prices or to consume more. Routines should be implemented that align with segmentation and customer data, while undergoing a retraditionalisation of the service through know-how and interaction. Only interaction with, and integration of, the customer adds significant value that can be further expanded by providing an atmosphere where customer and co-customer have the chance to interact.

This study aims to identify the prevalence of employee theft and rationalisations for taking company property, to help practitioners reduce workplace theft. The characteristics of workplaces where theft is common are identified, the items most likely to be stolen, the characteristics of the likely culprits, and their justifications for stealing. The study uses a questionnaire to collect quantitative and qualitative data from hospitality workers, whose responses are analysed to determine the severity of employee theft and rationalisations for taking company property. Employee theft is shown to be common, and strongly associated with workplaces where under-staffing and inadequate training are also common. Casual workers, young people, and those paid least, are found to be those most tolerant of theft. By addressing the relationship between social consensus, moral reasoning, and petty theft, the discussion identifies causes of petty theft from an ethics perspective.

A range of stakeholders should inform planning processes if these processes are to be consistent with best practice principles. This article examines the case of the Twelve Apostles Visitor Centre, a tourism development proposed to be located in a National Park in Victoria, Australia. Limited opportunities were provided for meaningful stakeholder input during the planning phase. Despite the prevailing view among all major parties that some development of facilities would be appropriate, an absence of genuine consultation was experienced prompting a substantial redesign of the development concept as originally conceived (in 1996) and project delays which postponed the commencement of the development into 2000 by which time a new state government was in place.

The purpose of this article is to describe and document the nascent state of hospitality in colonial Victoria from the 1830s until the gold rushes of the 1850s. The primary source of such an account is the personal journal of a public servant, George Augustus Robinson, the Chief Protector of the Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate Department, perhaps the European with the most experience of travelling throughout the Port Phillip District. Accounts from other contemporary sources are used to complement Robinson's observations. Where accommodation houses were available, they were often crude establishments offering poor fare for travellers. The most comfortable accommodation was to be had on squatting runs, some of which had purpose-built huts for travellers. In some cases, hospitality meant sleeping with strangers, sharing beds with one other occupant or sleeping on shakedowns or mattresses on floors with numerous people. However, beyond the limits of settlement, travellers had to make their own arrangements, utilising abandoned Aboriginal shelters or shepherd huts, pitching their own tents, or simply sleeping on the ground wrapped in a blanket using a saddle or a log for a pillow.

This article offers an overview of the current state of food and beverage management research and some recommendations for the future development of the field. It begins from the premise that establishing such an overview requires an appreciation of the condition and consequences of hospitality research more generally for food and beverage research. A second premise is that understanding of food and beverage research is inseparable from comprehending the nature and role of food and beverage education more generally within the hospitality field. The central theme developed from this is that food and beverage management research is a Cinderella subject even within the hospitality field, where the latter has more generally largely failed to establish credibility within the academy. The irony of this situation lies in the fact that food and beverage management is one of the central subjects that potentially defines hospitality management. The near-utopian prescriptions for the future of food and beverage management research centre on building connections to other food-related research and hence to hospitality, eschewing much of what currently passes for hospitality management research in an effort to rebuild the subject field around the industry's core concerns.

Although food is a vital part of the chemical process of life, the manner in which people choose the foods that they eat is subject to a wide variety of external and internal influences. This study employed a sequential mixed method research design to investigate the influence of perceived body image, vanity and personal values on food purchasing behaviour among 18- to 30-year-old females. It was found that although personal values and orientation have a major influence on the food purchasing and consumption process, vanity, physical health and perceived body image were major factors of influence in the purchasing and consumption decision.

This research seeks to determine the perceived role that cruise ship crew play in regards to providing cruise passengers with word-of-mouth (WOM) information in respect to the activity/attraction choices at a destination. In-depth interviews were conducted with crew members in New Zealand and cruise passengers aboard three cruise ships voyaging between Australia and New Zealand. The findings from this research indicate that the crew members believe they play an influential role in providing passengers with WOM information. However, this finding was not supported by the cruise passengers, given that they most often used WOM information sources that were perceived to be independent of the cruise line.

This article continues the advocacy themes of recent hospitality research, which promote an interdisciplinary approach. This embraces the culinary arts, broader humanities disciplines and media studies, among others, and might complement the dominant technical and business discourse apparent in hospitality management and food and beverage operations education and practice. Drawing on some of these alternative approaches, this article explores the historical development of an ethnically diverse contemporary restaurant scene in Queensland's capital city, Brisbane, Australia. It is argued that consumer demand has been the primary driver of this apparent culinary diversity. On the other hand, the proposition that this phenomenon of culinary diversity in Brisbane restaurants is attributable to colonial ethnic enclaves and the postwar immigration boom is critically appraised. This article's contribution is that it recognises, within this Queensland perspective, that market forces can be identified by, and the hospitality sector might benefit from, fields of endeavour beyond a business management framework.

The debate over the adequacy of competency-based training (CBT) to meet the needs of service industries is far from over. In Australia, the national training package qualifications (which are CBT based) are well entrenched, with competency elements growing like bacteria on a buffet. Developed by industry for industry, this framework appears to have had little impact on training practices in the workplace. Enterprise training is not linked to the National Training Framework (Smith, Oczkowski, Noble, & Macklin, 2002). In colleges, atomistic customer service outcomes delivered in standardised, context-free conditions do little to meet the needs of service industries, tourism and hospitality in particular. Sociocultural approaches point to the context embeddedness of workplace learning, including the diversity of social interactions within the organisation and with customers. The industry is also a dynamic one, with ongoing changes to the tourism product (which includes service) to meet increasingly sophisticated expectations. Customers, including international visitors whose contribution is one of the country's largest sources of foreign income exchange, are looking for unique and culturally authentic experiences. Curriculum reform is an urgent priority if vocational training in colleges and workplaces is going to meet the emerging needs of this competitive services sector.

In this phenomenologically influenced study, three early career researchers share their lived experiences of engaging with grounded theory as either a ‘methodology’ or ‘method’ in their respective research projects. The three lived experiences were interpreted using a constructivist grounded theory approach. The study provides insights into their experiences associated with ‘learning about’ and ‘doing’ grounded theory. Based on these three early career researchers' experiences, learning to be a grounded theory researcher is constituted of three inter-connected processes: learning about and doing grounded theory (and qualitative research); researchers as socially situated and embodied, corporeal beings; and experiences of grounded theory learning contexts and curricula. Additionally, learning about and doing grounded theory is a multi-faceted social experience involving knowledge building, meaning making, skill development, reflexivity, axiology, conducive learning conditions, communities of practice principles as well as influences from researchers' affective domains.

In this article, travel is considered as offering moments of encounter with difference that generate new ideas and therefore new perceptions of being in the world for the individual. The role of the Other — of difference and the unknown — is important in the examination of the travel experience of encounter and Levinas's philosophy of the face-to-face encounter with the Other provides a conceptual framework for understanding the responsive relation to difference. This article also addresses the difficulty of writing about the experience in travel. It takes a critical approach through a flexible and interpretative method that attempts to represent the ephemeral nature of the travel experience in a manner that brings the traveller's interactive response to place and encounter to be part of the research. Three ‘voices’ — theory, critical-creative and narrative — reveal aspects of the relationship of the individual and difference for both traveller and researcher, and together offer a three-dimensional tool for tourism studies. This article aims to contribute to understanding the travel experience and, in the experimentation with mixed methodologies, to contribute to our theoretical frameworks through encouraging the reader to take a different journey of exploration.

This article critically reappraises a key concept in hospitality management (and specifically food and beverage management) — that of the meal experience. Focusing primarily on the commercial sense and applications of the concept, while recognising the many other contexts that provide a basis for much wider study of the phenomenon, the discussion questions the status of the meal experience as part of the ‘received wisdom’ of hospitality management on the grounds that empirical support for the concept, as represented in the published research literature, is limited both in quantity and evidential persuasiveness.

This article reports an experimental Delphi study of expert attitudes to management contracts in the Dutch hotel industry. The study was prompted by appreciation of the apparent trend towards the divesting of property by international hotel companies, which is also explored here. The purpose of the research reported was to ascertain expert views of the implications of such a trend for the Dutch hotel industry, which has a history of risk aversion and aversion to management contracts as a model for hotel operations. The Delphi approach allowed access to a variety of experts regarding different groups and stakeholder perceptions. The findings of the study, which is the first of its kind to address this question in the Dutch hotel industry context, suggest that there is an expectation of greater diversity in the financial arrangements for managing hotel operations, but no inclination to radically change the business practices that have hitherto characterised the Dutch hotel sector.

Reflecting on my own experiences conducting ethnographic fieldwork within the international backpacking community and the metaphorical (as well as physical) journey this entailed, this article provides an account of the fieldwork process as it is lived and focuses on the interplay between the academic as observer and the academic as observed. In particular, drawing on key excerpts from the author's fieldnotes, the article opens up the fieldwork process to closer scrutiny, examining the emotional, corporeal and social dimensions of research. In so doing, the article explores some of the tensions that can emerge for the tourism studies scholar, who as researcher, traveller and tourist may frequently occupy multiple roles and identities within an individual research project. However, rather than viewing these convergences as an obstacle or limitation, I suggest that when viewed through the methodological approach of autoethnography, they are in fact conducive to developing a more reflexive and critically orientated approach to tourism studies.

The purpose of this article is to describe and understand the nascent state of hospitality on the Victorian goldfields in the 1850s. The primary sources for such an account are the journals of miners, public officials, and other travellers spanning this decade. The gold rushes transformed hospitality in numerous ways; the number of travellers requiring hospitality increased exponentially, and significant commercialisation occurred to meet this increased demand. Despite mining representing a new wave of occupation of their lands (pastoralism being the first) Aboriginal people were often renowned for their hospitality on Victorian goldfields.

What constitutes a quality research student learning experience? Using an interpretive social sciences approach, the tradition of autoethnography and the interpretive processes of reflexivity and constructivist grounded theory, the individual and collective lived research student experiences of three students were constructed/interpreted and (re)constructed/(re)interpreted to provide insights into answers to this question. Each student had completed one research program and, at the time of publication, was currently enrolled in a doctoral program. Based on these three students' autoethnographies, quality research student experiences engender personal, social, supervisor, research profession, learning communities and other life connectivities. These connectivities are generated through conducive conditions for learning, communities of practice and inclusive research cultures wherein research students experience and do research in order to become researchers, and to belong to research communities.