A Journey Into The World of Hospitality and Tourism

My journey into the world of hospitality and tourism started unknowingly in 1968 when I was a doctoral student at Cornell University’s School of Business Administration. The Hotel School was located across the street from the Business School. Like all other business students at Cornell, I believed that the Hotel School was nothing more than a glorified vocational school that had no place at a respected university like Cornell. We looked down upon their students and referred to them as “cooks and housemen.” Little did I know then that I would join the ranks of those “cooks and housemen one day.” Upon completing my studies, I returned to my home in Israel and joined the Business School faculty at Tel-Aviv University as an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior. Then, a few years later, a strange event happened that changed the rest of my life. I was called to the university president’s office, who was educated in England and spoke English like a native. The president addressed me in English, knowing that I was educated in the United States of America, and said:

I called you to my office because we are looking for a person who has a graduate degree in Hospitality Management and could start a new program at our university in the field of Hospitality and Tourism Management. We couldn’t find such a person, but we noticed that you have a degree from Cornell University that has the finest hospitality school in the world and found that you had a minor in Hospital Administration. In my opinion, the difference between hospital and hospitality is a mere “ity,” and thus, I would like to make you an offer to return to Cornell and do a post-doctorate program at Cornell University’s hotel school.

At first, I thought he was joking, but noticing that his voice’s tone was rather serious, I realized that he meant what he said, and upon consultation with my wife, I accepted his offer and returned to Cornell for a post-doc in hospitality and tourism. Many years later, I wrote an editorial in the International Journal of Hospitality Management by the title of “The ‘ity’ factor” (Pizam, 2007). After spending 1 year at the Cornell Hotel School and learning as much as I could about hospitality and tourism, I returned to Tel-Aviv University to start a new degree in Hospitality and Tourism Management. But when I returned to Israel, I found a demoralized country recovering from the aftermath of the Yom-Kippur War that was almost lost to the neighboring Arab countries. Most young people and potential university students were still in the reserve armed forces, and the tourism industry was devastated. As a result, we had no students registered for the new degree. I took a temporary position with the University of Haifa that had already started a graduate degree program in hospitality and tourism management and managed their fledgling program. But after 1 year and a failed attempt to recruit new students, the University of Haifa terminated the program, and I returned to Tel-Aviv University. At that point, I was faced with the dilemma of going back to organizational behavior or leaving the country and joining a hospitality management program in a respected U.S. university. Having fallen in love with hospitality and tourism management, I decided to apply for a position at several U.S. universities and accepted an offer from the Hotel Restaurant and Travel Administration (HRTA) department at the University of Massachusetts (UMASS).

In my 8 years at UMASS, I taught and conducted research mostly in tourism management and tried my best to elevate the status of the field to a respectable academic discipline. In 1982, I became the Editor-in-Chief of CHRIE’s Hospitality Education and Research Journal (now the Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research) and served in this role until 1989. During those years, CHRIE was the owner and the publisher of the journal, and as the Editor-in-Chief, I had the task of doing everything. This included the review and selection of articles and the design of the cover page, the printing of the issues, and the distribution of the journal to its subscribers. Almost overnight, I became an editor, artistic designer, printing press operator, and mailing house expert. Simultaneously, I also served as Associate Editor of Annals of Tourism Research.

During those years, I observed that from an empirical research perspective

The academic field of tourism management was more advanced in research methodologies and quantitative analyses than hospitality management, though it was still significantly below other social science disciplines such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, and business administration.

The academic field of hospitality management was still in its infancy, and the empirical studies that were conducted at that time were mostly case studies and qualitative in their nature.

Years later, I co-wrote an article titled “Advances in Hospitality Research; From Rodney Dangerfield to Aretha Franklin,” which chronicled the development of empirical research in hospitality management (Rivera & Pizam, 2015).

In 1983, I moved to Orlando, Florida, and accepted Professor and Department Chair’s position in the College of Business Administration of the University of Central Florida. I was hired to create and chair a new department of hospitality management.

The next 7 years were the most frustrating and challenging times in my academic career. The college leadership was not supportive of the existence of a department that was, in their words, “preparing students to manage cooks and room attendants.” This negative attitude was exacerbated when the president and provost who initiated the program took a few vacant faculty lines from other business administration departments and allocated them to the hospitality management department. We were made the college’s laughing stock when we proposed new courses in Food & Beverage Management, especially in Alcoholic Beverages Management. I will never forget the statement of one of the college leaders who said to me, “You want our students to booze and get credit for it?” I jokingly renamed myself Rodney Dangerfield, the Hollywood actor who never gets any respect.

But, this poor treatment of our department turned out to be a blessing in disguise. When Harris Rosen, one of Central Florida’s hotel giants, heard about our plague, he decided to remedy the situation by making an $18 million donation that would be matched 1:1 by the state of Florida. His conditions were that (1) the department be moved out of the College of Business, (2) the department be elevated to the status of school with its own dean, and (3) the school relocated to a brand new location in the tourism zone of Orlando. When the beautiful campus was built, and the number of students increased 10-fold, I renamed myself Aretha Franklin, whose signature song is R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

Despite being an academic administrator for most of my career, I never neglected my first love, namely, research and publications. I have conducted numerous empirical studies, published 10 books, 186 scientific articles, 71 OP-EDS, and served 20 years as the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Hospitality Management. In 2018, I stepped down from my position as dean, took a 1-year sabbatical, and returned to the faculty as professor and endowed chair. My new found research interest is in the application of the hospitality culture to non-hedonic service industries such as health care, senior living, retail, and public services. I am advanced in age but have no plans to retire as long as I am physically and mentally able to fulfill my duties.

My career has been a long and winding road full of twists and turns that ultimately led me into an exciting nascent field of study and gave me the joy of researching it and creating the best hospitality management college in the nation.

Supplemental Material

sj-pdf-1-jht-10.1177_10963480211018550 – Supplemental material for A Journey Into The World of Hospitality and Tourism

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-jht-10.1177_10963480211018550 for A Journey Into The World of Hospitality and Tourism by Abraham Pizam in Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research