Introduction

This edited book is the result of Hotelschool The Hague's first international research symposium, which was held in April 2019. Hotelschool The Hague celebrated its 90th anniversary in that particular year, and next to all kinds of festivities, this 90th anniversary provided an excellent opportunity to organize an international research symposium. This 2-day event was a great success in our view, with excellent key notes and research paper presentation sessions. Thank you, all of the participants for joining in and to Hotelschool The Hague's board of directors for their full support.

This introduction chapter to the book aims to ‘warm up’ the reader for the central theme of the conference Hospitable futures – Preparing talents and understanding the technology to create meaningful encounters. This theme summarized and emphasized the three great challenges for the international hospitality industry: talent management, technological innovation and meaningfulness human guest experience encounters in a digitalizing global society and international business environment. We will briefly touch upon these challenges in this chapter.