How did the COVID-19 pandemic influence students’ career expectations in the hotel and tourism industry?

Career expectations contribute to job satisfaction and worker persistence. The tourism industry is characterized by high staff turnover. The industry was decimated by the COVID-19 pandemic causing widespread unemployment and transforming working conditions, while radically altering educational conditions for hospitality and tourism students. We assessed how the pandemic influenced students' expectations, comparing undergraduate opinions before and during the pandemic. While Pandemic-Students were more pessimistic about working conditions, they revealed an increased desire to provide personal interactive service and a greater tendency towards entrepreneurialism. These results contrast with previous research; highlighting students’ resilience and suggesting a positive vision of pandemic-related opportunities.


Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic (and government reactions) provoked a precipitous economic downturn. It decimated major sectors of the economy and had a particularly devastating impact on the mental and physical health of so-called "front-line" workers; often represented by individuals in low-pay work, demanding working conditions with a high risk of interpersonal contact. While the latter description provides a fair generalization of working conditions in the tourism and hospitality industry, individual business faced radically contrasting scenarios during the first year of the pandemic: many touristic businesses were temporarily (or permanently) closed, meanwhile some hotels were obliged to provide COVID-19 quarantine facilities and thus constituted part of the governments designated essential services. In the wake of the pandemic, many former employees found themselves out-of-work with the industry in general facing an uncertain future. Here, we assessed how the pandemic influenced the career expectations of two distinct cohorts of future workers, comparing Hotel and Tourism Management undergraduate opinions before the pandemic (2015) with an otherwise equivalent group experiencing "lockdown-online-learning" during the pandemic (2021). Reliant upon in-person services, this erstwhile expanding economic sector offers an informative window onto how the risk of a pandemic influences career expectations within one of the most vulnerable branches of the global economy.
Employees are key to the success of quality service in the hotel industry, where the experiential environment is built upon close contact between workers and customers (Kusluvan & Kusluvan, 2000). Service is influenced by the employees' attitude towards their jobs that, in turn, affects customer satisfaction and the subsequent loyalty of tourists' choice (Kim, 2008;Turanligil & Altintas, 2018). This emphasises the value of investing in human resources training and otherwise promoting the active motivation of staff to help ensure the provision of quality service (Canny, 2002 andNg &Burke, 2006, as cited in Lu & Adler, 2009). Yet this widespread recognition contrasts with the hotel industry's justified reputation for low numbers of workers with higher education qualifications compared to other sectors (Kusluvan & Kusluvan, 2000). It reflects hoteliers' apparent preference for low skilled and low paid workers, which implies a correspondingly low investment in human resources (Turanligil & Altintas, 2018).
The lack of investment in human resources may contribute to the high turnover of workers in this sector (Dawson et al, 2011;Blomme et al., 2009). This underinvestment is exacerbated by the characteristically high intensity of the work (Turanligil & Altintas, 2018) and frequent employee exhaustion (Dawson et al., 2011). Stress, anti-social working hours coupled with a lack of family-friendly work policies are also recognized as contributing to a high rate of employee turnover (Vong & Tang, 2017).
The percentage of tourism graduates that leave the industry within five years after starting work in this sector is notoriously high (McKercher et al., 1995, as cited in Lu & Adler, 2009. Recent graduates often seek work in a different area of their original training after their first job in tourism/hotels, leaving the industry, on average, after two years. Meanwhile, directors/managers tend to remain somewhat longer, yet still leave after an average of three to five years (Lu & Adler, 2009). The problem of high turnover has been reported across diverse contexts and different countries, including New Zealand (Kim, 2008), Turkey (Kusluvan & Kusluvan, 2000), Norway (Dagsland et al., 2015), India (Va et al., 2014), China (Wong & Ko, 2009), Macau (Vong & Tang, 2017).
While high turnover rates are associated with a variety of issues, applied research has tended to focus on the apparent lack of vocation to work in the tourist industry (Kokt & Strydom, 2014) and the specific area of students' expectations (Blomme et al, 2008, as cited in Blomme et al., 2009. Understanding these issues is of crucial importance for higher education institutions so they might balance the students' expectations with subsequent working conditions and otherwise optimize their provision of vocational learning. Previous studies on hospitality and tourism students' expectations towards their career have revealed both positive and negative expectations (Thetsane et al., 2020). Students tend to be optimistic about the future (Lu & Adler, 2009), having positive expectations across a range of different perspectives. They expect good job and career opportunities and high earnings during their career progression (Lu & Adler, 2009;Richardson, 2009;Richardson & Butler, 2012). They also tend to show enthusiasm about the cultural diversity (or internationalism) of the work, particularly with regard to the possibility to meet and communicate with different people and to travel and work in exotic places (Blomme et al., 2009;Kim, 2008;Kokt & Strydom, 2014;Lu & Adler, 2009;Thetsane et al., 2020). A desire to demonstrate empathy has also been documented with students keen to interact with guests and otherwise provide excellent service (Blomme et al., 2009;Brown et al., 2015;Kokt & Strydom, 2014;Kusluvan & Kusluvan, 2000). Students expect to apply what they have learned during their undergraduate studies and to innovate and build upon their formal learning (Kusluvan & Kusluvan, 2000;Lu & Adler, 2009). Students have also highlighted the importance of autonomy and their expectations for a reasonable degree of freedom in their approach to work with scope to exercise personal creativity (Kusluvan & Kusluvan, 2000). Considerable emphasis has often been given to entrepreneurialism with many revealing an intention to begin their own business (Borges et al., 2021;Kokt & Strydom, 2014;Njorojge, 2015). At the same time, students also recognize negative aspects of their future career in tourism and hospitality (Gu et al., 2007, as cited in Lu & Adler, 2009. These include starting out in low paid positions and the perception that serving others may be regarded as low prestige work (Kusluvan & Kusluvan, 2000). They also acknowledge the often stressful and tiring nature of the work and anti-social or non-family-friendly working hours. In addition, students typically express concern about low salaries and issues of job security associated with the seasonal nature of demand (Kusluvan & Kusluvan, 2000;Richardson & Butler, 2012).
The effects of Covid-19 on the tourism and hotel industry were catastrophic and without precedent. Lockdowns, travel regulations and social restrictions undermined all aspects of the hospitality industry (Joshi & Gupta, 2021). The pandemic increased unemployment amongst this sector's workers and obliged others to undertake additional tasks and radically transformed working conditions (Lopes et al., 2021). The hospitality industry was beholden to temporary governmental financial support and was otherwise obliged to focus on providing a "clean and safe" service (Kakkar, 2021). Students have been well aware of how the industry struggled with the lockdown response of governments and the associated decimation of tourism in general. At the same time, students own studies were also severely disrupted and the effect of these changes on their learning process and personal motivation may endure (Tan, 2021). This raises the important question: how were the expectations of hospitality and tourism students affected by the repercussions of the pandemic?
Previous research on how the pandemic influenced students' expectations about their studies and subsequent career have reached contradictory conclusions. Rosyidi (2021) reported that the number of tourism and hospitality students wishing to pursue a career in the industry dropped significantly. Meanwhile Lee and Chuang (2021) concluded that hospitality and tourism students revealed a greater commitment to their majors compared to students in other academic disciplines, despite the implications of the pandemic.
Students appear to recognize the need for the sector to adapt to the new conditions and the consequent demand for new skills that will be expected of them (Beneraba et al., 2022;Shah et al., 2021). Adaptable employees and resilient risk managers have been highlighted as key employee characteristics to manage this new situation (Joshi & Gupta, 2021). At the same time students have also indicated reduced optimism with respect to career opportunities, and heightened concerns regarding health and safety in the work environment, pay and sickness benefits, and the opportunities for professional growth and personal development (Beneraba et al., 2022).
Context and timing are of fundamental importance in discerning public opinion. The studies, cited above, were all obtained during the pandemic; asking individuals to retrospectively compare how their opinions changed in relation to their previous (pre-pandemic) ideas. The risk of bias associated with this type of personal-retrospective survey design are widely recognized in health research (e.g. Scholten et al., 2017), where individuals that have suffered an injury or other health problems tend to overestimate the quality of their past health, i.e., before the problem occurred (Blome & Augustin, 2015: Hinz et al., 2022. In the context of career expectations and the pandemic, personal-retrospective evaluation might suffer the same type of bias caused (in this case) by the severe impact to the "health and well-being" of the tourism and hospitality industry. At the same time, it is worth considering that this potential source of bias might be compounded by the increase in pandemic-related mental health problems that has been reported amongst higher education students (Dumitrache et al., 2021).
In this study, we consider the influence of the pandemic on student expectations by comparing data from identical questionnaire surveys conducted before the pandemic, 2015, and again, in 2021, during the pandemic. The survey targeted Hospitality and Tourism undergraduate students attending a Portuguese higher education institution.
In Portugal, before the pandemic, tourism was growing fast, representing 8.4% of the national gross value added (GVA) in 2019. With the pandemic, in 2020, tourism GVA decreased by 44%. Several companies had to reduce or stop their operations and there were widespread lay-offs. From 2019 to 2020, the number of guests decreased 61,3% and 28,800 jobs were lost in the tourism sector (Costa, 2021). The pandemic also impacted the educational sector. At the higher education institution considered in this work, all teaching activities were conducted exclusively online from 16 th March 2020 until the end of the summer semester and again between 17 th January and 16 th April of 2021. Thereafter a mixed system, with theoretical and theoretical-practical classes conducted online and practical classes conducted at the institution, was implemented.
The aim of this research is to understand if the pandemic's initial impacts on tourism and hospitality and the educational experience of students influenced students' outlook about their career ambitions. We expected the extreme down-turn and long-term uncertainty in this key economic sector would have a negative effect on student commitment to this sector, their internships experience, expectations in terms of career development and work conditions and opinions/intentions with regard to professional qualifications.

Population and sample
The population of this study was undergraduate degree students in Tourism and Hotel Management, at a Portuguese higher education institution. Surveys were conducted in 2015 -before the pandemic (BP) -and 2021 -during the pandemic (DP). The data represents student responses to a questionnaire about career expectations. Participation was voluntary, respondents were anonymous, data were analysed collectively for global trends and respondents were informed about the use of data. No further ethical issues are pertinent to this study.
BP students replied during May and June 2015, while attending "in-person" classes (n = 89). DP students replied during May 2021, online (n = 77). The questionnaire was shared via social and communication network groups specific to students of this study cycle. Due to the pandemic and the lockdown, DP students attended one and a half semesters exclusively online. When they replied to the questionnaire, they were attending a mixed system, with practical classes at the institution and theoretical and theoretical-practical classes online.
The pandemic did not appear to affect the demand for Hospitality and Tourism related studies with 100% of the vacancies occupied in 2020 in the Tourism and Hotel Management undergraduate degree course on which this study was based.

Questionnaire
Section one of the questionnaire covered the respondents' demographic profile: age, year, previous professional experience, internships in the Tourism and Hospitality area and intention to continue academic studies after finishing the undergraduate course. The second section of the questionnaire presented questions on career expectations in the tourism and hospitality industry. Adapted from the study of Richardson (2009), Lu andAdler (2009) and Richardson and Butler (2012), 17 questions were asked, prefixed with the introduction "A career in the tourism and hospitality industry will offer me …" completed with sentences such as: "Pleasant working environment", "Job mobilityeasy to get a job anywhere", "A job that can easily be combined with parenthood". Respondents were asked to indicate their level of agreement with each statement according to a 5-point agreement Likert scale, with the categories "1-I strongly disagree", "2-I disagree", "3-I do not agree nor disagree", "4-I agree" and "5-I strongly agree". DP students were also asked about their level of concern about their career due to the pandemic and its effects on the hotel and tourism industry.

Statistical analysis
Differences between BP and DP responses were assessed by chi-square tests (Agresti, 2013). When the assumptions of chi-square tests were not upheld, i.e., for sparsely populated contingency tables (with a minimum expected value less than 1 and/or with more than 20% of cells with an expected value less than 5 (Agresti, 2013) caused by small number of responses in some categories) data from adjacent related categories were pooled.
An overall summary of students career expectations was evaluated by Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), with factor extraction by the principal components method, followed by a Varimax rotation (Marôco, 2014). To determine the number of factors to extract, the Kaiser criteria, scree plot analysis and percentage of variance explained were considered (Marôco, 2014;Pestana & Gageiro, 2008). The validity of EFA was evaluated by KMO criteria. Although the items were not removed, the only ones considered in the interpretation were those for which the communality was greater than 0.4 (Hair et al., 2011;Henseler, Ringle, & Sinkovics, 2009) and the factorial loadings in the rotation matrix were greater than 0.5. The scores for each of the factors considered were obtained by Bartlett's method. Mann-Whitney tests were performed to test the significance of differences in scores between respective groups of students (BP v DP).
All the statistical analysis were performed with the software IBM SPSS Statistics, version 27.

Results
The Tourism and Hotel Management degree was the first choice for more than 80% of the students participating in this study (88.8% for BP; 80.5% for DP).
A Chi-squared test for independence revealed a significant difference of BP and DP students in terms of previous internships experience (χ 2 (1166) = 5.272, p = 0.022). In the sample studied, the majority of students had not yet completed internships in tourism and hospitality, but this tendency became more emphatic during the pandemic (62.9% BP vs 79.1% DP).
Overall 23.5% of the respondents manifested an intention to continue their studies after finishing the undergraduate course. The intention to pursue additional qualifications differed significantly before and during the pandemic (χ 2 (1, n = 166) = 13.234, p < 0.001) reflecting a three-fold increase in DP students (36.4%) vs BP students (12.4%).
DP students revealed personal concerns about the possible impacts of the pandemic in their professional future (61.1% "some" and 21.5% "a lot" of concern). Figs. 1-3 represent the mean value for various aspects of career expectation, after coding the 5-point Likert scale categories numerically from 1 to 5.
"Flexible work schedule", "A job that can be easily combined with parenthood" and "A good starting salary" were issues representing comparatively low overall levels of agreement with the percentages of positive answers representing 37.5%, 27.7% and 25.9%, respectively. Expectations with generally high levels of agreement (agree or strongly agree) were "A job where I can use my university degree" (94%), "A job which gives me responsibility" (92.2%), "Opportunity to develop my competences and skills" (88.6%) and "Become a supervisor/ manager/ director" (83.7%). The majority of students (68.1%) replied positively to the statement "Set up my own business", broadly comparable to the percentage who valued "The opportunity to travel abroad" (75.3%) and "Job mobility" (66.9%). Table 1 presents the results for the Chi-square independence test comparing the relationship between the timing of the pandemic and career expectations. Responses provided for three statements indicated a significant difference before vs during the pandemic: "Flexible work schedule", "Interaction with customers and/or guests, providing excellent service" and "Set up my own hospitality/ tourism business".
BP-students identified greater optimism with respect to the expectation of a "flexible schedule" (40%) compared to DP-students (24%). "Interaction with customers and/or guests, providing excellent service", appeared to be more valued by DP students, with only 5.2% indicating no positive response before the pandemic compared with 19.1% during the pandemic. Similarly, "Set up my own hospitality/tourism business" was comparatively more valued by DP students with only 2.6% responding negatively. In contrast, for the BP students the corresponding percentage was 16.9%.
For the variables referring to career expectations, exploratory factorial analysis produced a KMO = 0,789 and significant Bartlett's sphericity test, indicating the analysis was appropriate (Pestana & Gageiro, 2008). Based on the Kaiser criteria, the scree plot and (total and individual factor) variance explained (Marôco, 2014), the key patterns in the data were adequately explained by three latent factors. Table 2 summarizes the results.
The primary factor explained 26.2% of the total variance and, given the expectations with high loadings in this factor, the axis can be summarized as representing "Job stability and career optimism". The secondary factor explained 14.2% of the total variance and effectively summarizes issues of "Knowledge and competence". The third factor explained 8.8% of the total variance and essentially refers to "Management and independence".

Discussion
DP students revealed a considerable level of concern about the impacts of the pandemic on the hotel and tourism industry and, consequently, about their future career prospects. This echoes the findings of Rosyidi (2021) and Beneraba et al. (2022)  pandemic related career anxieties of tourism-related students in other contexts. However, the concerns expressed by students in our study were evidently not enough to dissuade them from their ambitions in choosing this area of work with most students -BP and DPreporting that Hotel and Tourism Management was their first choice undergraduate course.
The pandemic was associated with a significant decrease in internships by students. Blomme et al. (2013Blomme et al. ( , 2009) posited that one of the reasons for the high turnover rates in the hotel and tourism industry is students' expectations. Internships constitute an opportunity for students to gain first-hand experience of a profession in this sector, so the reduction in internships can exacerbate issues of false expectations. Internships are also important to enhance the development of competences and help facilitate the start of a career in this sector (Ferreras-Garcia et al., 2020), implying that the consequent reduction could affect the professionalism and practical abilities of future workers.
As highlighted by previous research (Canny, 2002, as cited in Lu & Adler, 2009), training and education play an important role to   ensure quality. During the pandemic, comparatively more students said that they plan to continue their academic education by doing a master's degree. As was noted by Shah et al. (2021), students considered that, with the pandemic, employment in the area of tourism has become more competitive and multitasking, which might explain why more students demonstrated a commitment to further learning. The pandemic was associated with a significant difference in student expectations for the categories: "Flexible work schedule", "Interaction with customers and/or guests, providing excellent service" and "Set up my own hospitality/tourism business". This represents fewer overall changes in expectation than have been reported in previous research (Beneraba et al., 2022;Shah et al., 2021) and, in contrast, responses to the latter two categories tended to be moreas opposed to lesspositive in our study. These surprising differences might, in part, be explained by the different methods of survey design used to assess the pre-pandemic expectations and the consequent absence of personal-retrospective bias in this study (Hinz et al., 2022;Scholten et al., 2017). While our DP students anticipated relatively less flexibility of work schedules, they otherwise demonstrated increased ambitions towards setting up their own businesses. Entrepreneurship is common motivation amongst hospitality and tourism students (Borges et al. (2021)). In the case of our study group (predominately Portuguese nationals) the increased uncertainty and general disruption to the previous status quo appears to have inspired a wave of opportunistic entrepreneurialism amongst the students.
Interestingly, the pandemic was also associated with an increased desire to provide excellent service by interacting with clients on a personal level. Previous studies also referred to the interest of students to interact with clients (Blomme et al., 2009;Brown et al., 2015;Kokt & Strydom, 2014;Kusluvan & Kusluvan, 2000). Crucially, the pandemic provides a nuanced context for the interpretation of this observation. On the one hand, students themselves suffered limited social interactions, with impacts on their learnings and mental health (Dumitrache et al., 2021;Pavin Ivanec, 2022). On the other, students perception that pandemics cause uncertainty and require increased attention to special requirements amongst tourists/service users highlights, once again, the recognition of career opportunities by discerning students associated with the acquisition of new skill sets in a changing service market.

Conclusions and recommendations
This study has implications for both the theory and practice of research focused on the hotel and tourism industry. While our robust before-during survey design enabled us to avoid cognitive bias associated with retrospective personal assessment, it ultimately limits the capacity to reproduce the methodology and thereby evaluate the wider generality of our findings (across different institutions, different countries, etc.). At the same time it highlights the pragmatic value of established base-line datasets that can be repurposed to help understand the impact of unexpected events, such as the COVID pandemic, on students' career expectations.
In general, the observed results refute our original expectations and maygiven the major negative repercussions for the tourism and hospitality industryappear somewhat counter-intuitive. However, the given responses trace a coherent pattern that portrays an underlying commitment and positive mental attitude in the face of the COVID pandemic.
The lack of negative responses on behalf of this student population revealed an unanticipated resilience and resourcefulness towards their chosen professional careers. As Hotel and Tourism Management was the first choice degree course for the overwhelmingly a Eigenvalues and % of explained variance after an EFA with the extraction of 3 factors by the principal components method, followed by a varimax rotation. b In bold we identify the items with factor rotation loadings greater than 0.5 and with communality greater than 0.4. majority of respondents, it is clear that students were not deterred from their specialist vocation. Furthermore, many students appear to have spotted new opportunities, resulting in an observable increase in their personal ambitions, including their desire to provide personal service and otherwise cater for the emerging needs of a pandemic prone world. In addition, a greater proportion of students expressed a wish to set up their own business, reflecting a relative increase in entrepreneurialism. This overall positive interpretation reveals two important knowledge gaps. Firstly, the remarkably high-level of commitment to a career in this area reinforces the general need to develop a better understanding of the issues that cause subsequent career abandonment so that, on the one hand, students may better prepare themselves for the workplace and, on the other, industry can better attract and retain these (originally) highly motivated professionals. Secondly, the relative increase in students' intentions to continue their formal education following their degree course highlights the perceived importance of educational institutions to students' career development. This challenges educators to critique if (and, if so, how) our own service could be improved/revised to optimize the development of a broad skill-set compatible with the evolving demands of personal service arising from pandemics or other (future) global uncertainties. As the provision of vocational learning is explicitly designed to serve specific institutional ends this recognition emphasises the need to consult and to otherwise develop investigative partnerships with interested stakeholders across the hotel and tourist industry.
In summary, there can be no doubt that the pandemic has been an industry game-changer; transforming the needs, desires and opportunities of clients and demanding an appropriate reciprocal response from business owners and workers alike. Our study indicates that students recognize this new reality and are eager to rise to the challenge.