Courses

This class will introduce students to some of the issues and trends pertinent to hospitality businesses. Materials will be drawn from relevant theories, empirical research, and contemporary articles on a range of issues that affect how hospitality organizations do business and plan for the future. 

This course will examine the planning and development functions of the hospitality and tourism industry. The course will cover backgrounds in tourism planning, planning hospitality attractions, development and design standards, planning resorts, and impacts of the industry and how to plan to minimize these impacts.

Case studies will be used to help students develop an understanding of the interrelationship among the concepts. This course collectively addresses numerous components as they relate to increasing livelihoods, developing businesses, and creating resilient communities. 

This course consists of two parts – theoretical and practical. From the theory perspective, this is an introductory course in descriptive and inferential statistics. The course approaches abstract concepts in a systematic and logical progression so that they are easily attainable. The topics include levels of measurement, frequency distributions, measures of central tendency and dispersion, probabilities and normal distribution, sampling distribution of the mean, and confidence intervals, among others.

Students will learn the logic of hypothesis testing and have a general understanding of how the statistical procedures – t-test, one-way ANOVA, chi-square, correlations, and regression – work. They will learn how to select an appropriate statistical test for a given research question. From a practical angle, the course teaches basic data analysis skills through hands-on lab assignments involving real data, mostly from social sciences, sports, and tourism. The lab part of the course has a steep, but manageable, learning curve when students get to know SPSS software, its interface, and main commands. Throughout the course, students should allocate the appropriate amount of time for SPSS assignments. 

This course introduces students to research methodology and the application of social science research. Areas covered include the study of the research process, research designs, proposal writing, sampling procedures, measurement, survey research, hypothesis testing, and the research presentation. 

This course is designed as an introductory subject to provide students with a broad understanding of the tourism and hospitality industry, sectors, businesses, and their roles and impacts in the wider economic and social environment.

Although the tourism and hospitality industry encompass a multitude of operations, this course will largely focus on promotions, lodging management, and meetings & conventions market segments. In addition, case study analysis will be largely used to enhance communication of concepts, ideas, and problem-solving abilities through individual and group decision-making in oral and written form. 

The hospitality industry is comprised of business firms, that in order to be successful, must properly manage the perishable nature of core products that are: service-based commodities, labor intensive, face fierce competition levels, and exist within ever-changing marketplace conditions.

The business landscape in the hospitality industry changes dramatically as consumer tastes and preferences evolve and micro trends reflect volatile macro conditions. This course assesses the nature of hospitality products and addresses the unique challenges hospitality professionals face in managing their firms.

The focus of the course involves the translation of those strategic managerial ideas into the context of hospitality business management thereby providing a better fit to a service-based industry as opposed to ideas found in general strategy literature. 

Hospitality and tourism managers are responsible for making strategic and proactive decisions regarding how to optimize firm revenues that are dependent upon the sale of a relatively fixed product supply and varying consumer demand. 

This course aims to empower students with knowledge and capacities to understand and analyze brand and branding management in the hospitality industry, from both a corporate and consumer perspective.

This objective will be to learn key concepts surrounding the subject: corporate perspective; the development of brand and brand architecture; the definition and role of marketing mix; the integration of marketing communication and brand management; the consumer perception in branding; etc. 

Hospitality Crisis Management is the process by which the industry deals with major unpredictable events that threaten to harm tourists, industry stakeholders, and the destination. Three elements are common to most definitions of crisis: (1) a threat, (2) the element of surprise, and (3) a short decision time.

Many organizations feel that crisis types are limited to natural disasters, not realizing that there are six other categories of crisis that can affect their destination. In this hospitality management course, you will be required to apply your crisis management knowledge and skills in the development of a Crisis Management Plan and Communication strategies for real-world situations. 

This course will provide a marketing analysis for the hospitality and tourism industry and give you the opportunity to create profitable marketing and brand strategies by building, measuring, and managing marketing plans and brands.

The course will cover key marketing principles, practices, and strategies applied in the tourism and hospitality industry. This course will also provide knowledge and application of steps to develop powerful tourism and hospitality products and make decisions to manage or solve tourism marketing problems.

The practicum provides students with an opportunity to engage in professional settings to enhance academic learning and further employment readiness upon graduation. Students gain experience and enhance skills through experiential learning. This opportunity helps students bridge the gap between course materials and real-world settings, furthering both academic and applied/business skills. 

Through this culminating experience, students will complete a professional paper derived from a real-world hospitality business management industry-related issue. Examples of appropriate professional paper topics include, but are not limited to, developing a marketing plan for a hotel, resort or destination, analyzing secondary data to address an issue for the industry, and working with an organizational client to address a client-identified issue.