Emotion Management in Small Hotels: Meeting the Challenges of Flexibility and Informality

Abstract

This paper shows that in small hotels, hotel owners interpret „hospitality‟ more broadly than mere commercial concerns. Hoteliers engage with three interdependent hospitality domains, commercial, social and private (Lashley, 2000), an approach that enables them to perceive guest interactions as informal; characterised by hoteliers wanting to „know‟ and „relate to‟ their guests. The findings here, drawn from a study of small hotels in the UK, show how owners manage this form of the „host-guest relationship‟ (Tucker, 2003) by employing a range of emotion management strategies. These mirror Bolton‟s 4Ps framework (2009) of pecuniary, professional, presentational and philanthropic emotion management roles. Adopting this fluid approach, rather than relying on emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983), enables the hoteliers to respond flexibly to meet the needs of their different types of guest. The findings in this paper validate Bolton‟s argument (2005) for using agential flexible emotion management that captures but goes beyond emotional labour.