Research in Hospitality Management: a retrospective and future views, and the case of padel sport

Abstract

Hospitality is a phenomenon in society that has attracted a lot of attention in research over the past few decades. The Hotel Management School Leeuwarden (HMSL) is one of the colleges of the Dutch University of Applied Sciences (UAS) NHL-Stenden with campuses in The Netherlands (Leeuwarden and Emmen), South Africa, Qatar, Thailand, Bali and Aruba. Since 1987, the HMSL has been educating people from all sorts of backgrounds for the hospitality industry and beyond at both Bachelor’s and Master’s degree level. In 2011, the Hotel Management School took a pivotal step in hospitality research by establishing the Research in Hospitality Management journal (currently open access through Taylor & Francis Online). Simultaneously, over the past 50 years, the sport known as padel has emerged and now has enthusiasts all over the whole world. The parallels and similarities between hospitality and padel are here described. Essentially, both have an important social element of people interacting with one another and creating communities, which increase feelings of well-being. Significantly more research is needed in the field of padel in particular to explore its social and community-building aspects. A potential direction for further research in hospitality and padel is suggested by using real world grounded research from combining traditional constructivist grounded theory and real world research.