Dying in Comfort: A Case Study of the Issues Encountered Through In-Depth Interviews With Hotel Managers and Housekeeping Staff in Managing Guests Who Choose to Die in Their Hotels

Abstract

The two aims of this study were to explore from both managerial and staff perspectives the issues encountered by hotel staff in managing a guest’s planned death within a commercial hotel environment and to explore the possibility of developing a new hybrid commercial product, the hospice-hotel. The guests in the four hotels in this study knew they were dying, had few living friends and relatives, and did not want to die alone. They had chosen to die in a hotel where they were well known to the hotel managers and indeed their staff, as many of them had been visiting the hotel for a number of years. The hotels in this study did not market this service to their guests, and only when the guests approached the hotel management about dying in their hotel, did they respond to this request. All of them had discussed dying in the hotel with the hotel manager, who had agreed to accommodate them and confirmed the financial arrangements.

This research involved a qualitative study in four hotels with their managers and housekeeping staff about the processes adopted in managing planned deaths and the impacts of such deaths on the hotel staff. It is not a study of either assisted deaths or suicides in hotels.

The initial challenges facing the researcher included the lack of co-operation from a number of funeral directors and the two city hospices, and the rejection of focus groups as the preferred methodology by the hotel managers. As the topic of planned deaths in hotels is an underexplored area of research within the hospitality discourse, additional challenges included a limited literature base, difficulty in reaching agreement with the hotel managers, and the rigor of the sampling procedures in the selection of staff to interview. The final selected methodology involved in-depth face-to-face interviews at four hotels, with four senior managers and 10 of their housekeeping staff. The weaknesses in the research methodology are explored, identified, and discussed, as well as the challenges in managing the interview processes when conducting research into a challenging subject with interviewees who found it difficult to “open up” and participate in the study. The key research lessons from this study included the need to adopt a flexible approach in the selection of the research methodology, the importance of providing feedback to participants about the study results, duty of care to participants, managing your own mental health, the need for confidentiality when dealing with commercial businesses, the importance of developing personal networks prior to starting the research, and writing and presenting the results not just for academic conferences and journals, but also at business conferences and for professional journals.

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