How COVID-19 Influences Hospitality and Tourism Education: Challenges, Opportunities, and New Directions

The outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 entirely disrupted everyone’s daily life including the education system (UNESCO, 2020). The pandemic influenced nearly 1.6 billion learners in more than 190 countries and all continents; universities in the world closed their campuses to avoid the spread of virus and offered online or hybrid classes through online platforms (United Nations, 2020). Students experienced mental stress derived from excessive online classes; faculty also struggled to teach via online platforms and experienced the extra burden because of the new mode of class delivery (Lei & So, 2021).

Despite its negative impacts on the Hospitality and Tourism (H&T) education, the COVID 19 pandemic situation has helped uncover the opportunities of alternative teaching and learning methods. Instructors have sought numerous active learning strategies to enhance student engagement and satisfaction in a virtual format; industry practitioners have designed customized virtual internships; and students have adopted the new mode of learning including Zoom classes, online discussion, and virtual group projects (Park & Jones, 2021; Zhong et al., 2021).

Hospitality industries are changing rapidly (Kim & Jeong, 2021); in part, the COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated the changes in hospitality industries. Service robots or advanced technologies are being adopted; social media marketing is becoming prevalent; and new business models are rampant, such as Airbnb or Uber Eats, just to name a few. To place our students in a better position for their future employment, H&T educators may want to consider designing interdisciplinary courses or multidisciplinary class projects with other majors such as, but not limited to, software or mechanical engineering, and enhance our students’ knowledge of big data analysis and artificial intelligence. Virtual internships can be further refined and utilized in the future as a means to broaden our students’ perspective (Park & Jones, 2021). We imagine our students take virtual internships all over the world to learn how to manage and operate international operations and interact with foreign customers.

Through this special issue, “The Impact of COVID-19 on Hospitality and Tourism Education,” we share a glimpse of massive changes that both H&T educators and students have recently undergone. We encourage further empirical research on teaching and learning following the pandemic; if possible, longitudinal studies, with a focus on long-term effects, are highly recommended. Thanks to a tremendous interest in this special issue, we received a large number of submissions. This special issue includes five selected articles. The articles accepted late will appear in regular issues. We hope you will find the information to be useful and helpful. We appreciate constructive comments from reviewers and hard work of authors. Cheers to our better future!