Importance Of Cultural Awareness In The Hospitality Industry

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The Hospitality sector is a highly diversified and demanding Industry, which forces its workers to possess prerequisite skills and traits to ensure they are adaptable in this rapidly changing sector. The hospitality Industry entails businesses that provides an intangible product, which is providing service to its visitors (Chon& Maier, 2009). Therefore, unlike other industries, hospitality workers have to possess not only academic skills but also social skills to provide optimum service for their visitors whose expectations grow as the industry diversifies. Hence, hospitality workers need to be culturally aware, able to provide excellent customer service and to actively engage in teamwork so they can correlate with their coworkers but to most importantly fulfill their guests’ wants, needs and desires to resultantly, achieve their goal of exceeding their guest’s expectations. Firstly, hospitality workers need to be culturally aware, so that they can comfortably converse, understand and overcome cultural stereotypes with guest and coworkers from different cultural identities to create harmonious relationships. According to Lum (2010), cultural awareness is the understanding and appreciation for different cultures, which includes individual’s language, etiquette, religion and dress. Consequently, hospitality workers should be aware of different cultures as they have to interact daily with coworkers and guest from different cultural backgrounds and experiences. Cultural