The Educational Value of "Captive Hotels"

Abstract

The authors identified 12 hotel-management schools that maintain full-service hotels as part of their curriculum and that involve faculty in the oversight of the facility. This study investigated the perceived importance of such "captive hotels" in delivering practical hotel-management education. The authors' study measured perceptions of the importance of practical education and the importance of captive training facilities in developing ten competencies that hotel-management graduates should possess. Those perceptions were gathered from entering hotel-management students, faculty, and corporate recruiters at five schools with captive hotels and five schools without such facilities. All three groups validated the importance of practical work experiences for each of the ten competencies. They agreed that an experiential-learning program is a crucial element of hospitality-management education, but there was less agreement among the groups regarding how essential it is to use a captive training facility to teach those skills.