What are the three lenses of Hospitalicology?

Psychology (the inner experience — Self-Determination Theory, Cognitive Appraisal, the Peak-End Rule, Attachment, Flow); Sociology (identity, status, role — Bourdieu on capital and habitus, Goffman on the presentation of self, Granovetter on ties); and Anthropology (ritual, meaning, culture — Van Gennep on liminality, Mauss on gift exchange, Mary Douglas on contamination, Polanyi on tacit craft). Psychology zooms in. Sociology zooms out. Anthropology reaches back. Hospitalicology holds all three at once, on both sides of the service encounter.

What is the guest journey in Hospitalicology?

Six core stages: 1) The Digital Handshake — the booking journey as an encounter with uncertainty; 2) Arrival — the threshold moment that sets the entire stay; 3) The Hotel as Stage — identity, status and the social performance of self; 4) Immersive World — environmental psychology and how space directs feeling; 5) Farewell — memory, meaning-making and the engineered last impression; 6) The Heart of House — emotional labour and what the work costs the people who do it.

Why does hospitality need a new analytical language?

Operational language describes what happens. It does not describe what it means. Two hotels at the same price and the same star rating can feel completely different — one feels like staying somewhere, the other like occupying a space. That difference is real and commercially significant, but almost invisible to the language hospitality has used to describe itself. Hospitalicology is the language for that difference.

Is Hospitalicology academic or practical?

Both. The book draws on 180+ academic sources and is theoretically grounded enough to use as a hospitality textbook, with learning objectives, discussion prompts and exercises. It is also written by a 30-year operator, so every chapter ends in frameworks immediately applicable to programme design, onboarding, team culture and guest-experience design.

The Guest Experience Buy the book

The framework

Hospitalicology.
The systematic study of being a guest, and of being a host.

The psychology of hospitality — together with its sociology and anthropology — is what this framework is built on. Hospitalicology is a new analytical discipline for the hospitality industry, drawing on three lenses the field has largely treated as separate: psychology, sociology, and anthropology. One framework. Two halves of one system.

Hospitalicology.The systematic study of being a guest, and of being a host.

Hospitalicology.
The systematic study of being a guest, and of being a host.