Human hospitalaty

As human history speeds into the twenty first century, with ever-increasing problems and wider opportunities, the profession of hospitality services management, is attracting more and more attention from companies,families and institutions. Hotel and catering operations and management have evolved from its early origin in Ancient Egypt, Greek and Roman Empires into a comprehensive body of knowledge and practices in modern time. This has spread throughout European nations to the continent of America and to the developing nations of Asia and Africa. The application of modern management techniques to the operation of hospitality services are being used by such giant international organisations as Hilton Hotel, Trans-world Airline Catering, Holiday Inn, Kentucky Fried Chicken the famous Burger King and MacDonald Hamburger Companies.

The application of modern scientific management to the operation of providing food, accommodation and leisure services to people away from their homes has moved with globalization from Europe to America, Asia and to the modern Afrikan nations.The practice gained momentum in such establishments as the Grand Metropolitan Group Hotels, J.Lyons Group of Catering Organisation, Empire Catering Companies and Batman Catering Organisation in the UK. The practice is even more advanced in West Germany, France,India Kenya, Zambia, South Africa and Japan. In Nigeria, ours began almost as an accident of our colonial history and experience. The intensifying interest in hospitality services management in the recent years, has demonstrated an increased social awareness of our people that catering for people is the finest occupation in the world.

This book throws light for the first time in Nigeria, on the application of modern management principles to the operation of hotel and catering business with Nigerian cultural modifications. This book although an introduction shows boldly that to understand catering operations, we must first understand the concept of organisation, the principles of human relations and basic human needs.

Our time, society and world are changing. The relationship between people and the environments has changes and still changing. These changes reflect conspicuously in respect of ecology, security, public services, poverty,survival, over-population, technological advancement and stable government. In our search for relevant technology and effort to cope with these changes, a basic conflict of values has surfaced between the old and the new ways of handling existential problems.

African indigenous traditional values are pulling us towards the cherished good old ideas while our inherent capacity to question the viability of such values in the light of modernism compels us to establish new ones, based on our current needs and wants. As technologists, we have specific responsibility of meeting these changes. In the training of future generations of the catering managers, we must embrace new technological cultures and avoid myopic syndromes.