Luxury hospitality revisited: A Cambodian perspective

Abstract

Research on luxury tourism and hospitality has been predominantly conducted in Euro-American contexts and is oftentimes based on consumers' perspectives, which calls for more contextualisation and the need for multi-stakeholder views. We move away from the conventional Euro-American context by addressing luxury tourism in Cambodia, a largely agrarian culture rapidly emerging in the tourism travel circuit, by providing an answer to the research question ‘How is luxury hospitality defined, exercised and felt in an emerging destination?’ Drawing on stakeholder theory, we analysed 26 interviews conducted with multiple stakeholders in the tourism industry in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. The fine-grained findings point at a fusion of high industry standards and an indigenous culture of hospitality. As the study's theoretical contributions are to build on locally-grounded and multi-stakeholder understandings, we offer several practical takeaways for service providers and consumers to ascertain and experience luxury services in a reconsidered and renewed manner.