The food packaging industry goes through changes in food items and their weights quite rapidly. These items range from easy-to-pick, single-piece food items to flexible, long and cluttered ones. We propose a replaceable bit-based gripper system to tackle the challenge of weight-based handling of cluttered food items. The gripper features specialized food attachments(bits) that enhance its grasping capabilities, and a belt replacement system allows switching between different food items during packaging operations. It offers a wide range of control options, enabling it to grasp and drop specific weights of granular, cluttered, and entangled foods. We specifically designed bits for two flexible food items that differ in shape: ikura(salmon roe) and spaghetti. They represent the challenging categories of sticky, granular food and long, sticky, cluttered food, respectively. The gripper successfully picked up both spaghetti and ikura and demonstrated weight-specific dropping of these items with an accuracy over 80% and 95% respectively. The gripper system also exhibited quick switching between different bits, leading to the handling of a large range of food items.
Although self-supervised 3D anomaly detection assumes that acquiring high-precision point clouds is computationally expensive, in real manufacturing scenarios it is often feasible to collect a limited number of anomalous samples. Therefore, we study open-set supervised 3D anomaly detection, where the model is trained with only normal samples and a small number of known anomalous samples, aiming to identify unknown anomalies at test time. We present Open-Industry, a high-quality industrial dataset containing 15 categories, each with five real anomaly types collected from production lines. We first adapt general open-set anomaly detection methods to accommodate 3D point cloud inputs better. Building upon this, we propose Open3D-AD, a point-cloud-oriented approach that leverages normal samples, simulated anomalies, and partially observed real anomalies to model the probability density distributions of normal and anomalous data. Then, we introduce a simple Correspondence Distributions Subsampling to reduce the overlap between normal and non-normal distributions, enabling stronger dual distributions modeling. Based on these contributions, we establish a comprehensive benchmark and evaluate the proposed method extensively on Open-Industry as well as established datasets including Real3D-AD and Anomaly-ShapeNet. Benchmark results and ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of Open3D-AD and further reveal the potential of open-set supervised 3D anomaly detection.
The re-election of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States in 2024 marks a significant shift in US-Iran relations, with far-reaching consequences for Iran’s tourism sector. This brief report examines the potential impact of Trump’s foreign policy, particularly the re-imposition of sanctions and escalating military tensions, on a tourism industry that had shown promising growth under the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Following Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA in 2018, Iran’s tourism sector suffered declining international arrivals, increased economic isolation and infrastructural setbacks. His return to office, reinforced by the National Security Presidential Memorandum signed on 4 February 2025, signals a revival of aggressive policies that may further weaken Iran’s global tourism appeal. Drawing on political economy and tourism resilience frameworks, this brief report explores how sanctions, geopolitical instability and regional competition shape the industry’s trajectory. It also considers Iran’s potential strategies for adaptation, including strengthening non-Western tourism partnerships, leveraging alternative financial systems, and promoting domestic and religious tourism. While this article does not seek to predict exact outcomes, it highlights the broader vulnerability of tourism-dependent economies in politically volatile regions, and underscores the need for resilience strategies in the face of shifting global power dynamics.
Hospitality industry. Hotels, clubs, restaurants, etc. Food service
Christopher A. Saniel, Avein C. Rivera, Ken Gabriel R. Rosal
et al.
This study investigated the relationship between intrinsic motivations and tourist satisfaction in cave tourism in the District 1 of Quezon Province, Philippines, with a focus on Tinipak Cave, Malaog Cave, and Lawigue Cave. The study utilized Frequency Percentage, Weighted Arithmetic Mean, Kruskal-Wallis, Mann-Whitney, and Spearman tests for data analysis. Findings indicated that most respondents, predominantly aged 18–27, male, students, and employed individuals, had their motivations fulfilled through educational and experiential activities offered at the caves. Data collected from 45 visitors revealed a significant correlation between intrinsic motivations, such as enjoyment, relaxation, novelty-seeking, escape, socialization, and knowledge, and overall satisfaction. The study underscored the importance of recognizing and addressing these intrinsic motivations to enhance visitor satisfaction and promote sustainable tourism practices. Recommendations for tourism offices include improving guide training, upgrading facilities and amenities, and involving visitors in ongoing research and conservation efforts. These strategies aim to foster a deeper appreciation for natural attractions and ensure a more fulfilling experience for all tourists.
Hospitality industry. Hotels, clubs, restaurants, etc. Food service, Recreation. Leisure
Sajad Khatiri, Francisco Eli Vina Barrientos, Maximilian Wulf
et al.
Ensuring robust robotic navigation in dynamic environments is a key challenge, as traditional testing methods often struggle to cover the full spectrum of operational requirements. This paper presents the industrial adoption of Surrealist, a simulation-based test generation framework originally for UAVs, now applied to the ANYmal quadrupedal robot for industrial inspection. Our method uses a search-based algorithm to automatically generate challenging obstacle avoidance scenarios, uncovering failures often missed by manual testing. In a pilot phase, generated test suites revealed critical weaknesses in one experimental algorithm (40.3% success rate) and served as an effective benchmark to prove the superior robustness of another (71.2% success rate). The framework was then integrated into the ANYbotics workflow for a six-month industrial evaluation, where it was used to test five proprietary algorithms. A formal survey confirmed its value, showing it enhances the development process, uncovers critical failures, provides objective benchmarks, and strengthens the overall verification pipeline.
Parikshat Singh Manhas, Priyanka Sharma, Joana A. Quintela
This study investigates the multifaceted relationships between product innovation, customer satisfaction, and experience within the quick service restaurants (QSR) sector. Moreover, it explores the reciprocal dynamics, scrutinizing the impact of customer experience on shaping customer satisfaction. Furthermore, the research delves into the mediating function of customer experience in establishing the connection between product innovation and customer satisfaction. The participant pool encompassed 221 respondents, patrons of well-established QSRs, such as McDonald’s, Domino’s Pizza, Pizza Hut, and KFC, strategically situated in three prominent north Indian cities—Jammu, Chandigarh, and Delhi. Employing a structural equation modelling technique, the study meticulously examines the relationships between these crucial elements (product innovation, customer experience and customer satisfaction). This research contributes to existing knowledge by offering a detailed study of the dynamics governing product innovation, customer satisfaction, and experience in the QSR sector. The findings bear practical implications for QSR operators, providing valuable insights into strategies for enhancing customer satisfaction through effective product innovation and an elevated dining experience.
PurposeCustomer incivility is a crucial issue that has multiple negative effects on organizations, especially in the hospitality industry. This study identified the antecedents of customer incivility and investigated its outcomes on frontline employees (FLEs) in the emerging market of Vietnam.Design/methodology/approachThis study used a quantitative methodology featuring interviews with 476 FLEs who frequently experienced customer incivility in Vietnamese restaurants and hotels. The data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.FindingsThe findings demonstrated four antecedents of customer incivility (training/knowledge, FLE incivility, service orientation, and environment) and three outcomes (revenge motivation, service sabotage, and turnover intention), as well as the mediating role of revenge motivation.Practical implicationsManagers can establish and upgrade training lessons with different syllabi for numerous FLE groups to improve staff perceptions and enhance the organization’s service orientation and environment, which can support the minimization of revenge motivation, service sabotage, and turnover intention among frontline staff members.Originality/valueThis study highlights how impactful customer incivility is and how to eliminate it by clarifying its origins and effects in Vietnamese hotel and restaurant organizations.
The aim of this study was to examine the effectiveness and efficacy of marketing strategies tour operators use for promotion of township tourism small enterprises in KZN province. This research utilized a quantitative approach to measure and analyse numerical results in the context of small tourism enterprises in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa Statistical tests such as correlation coefficient and regression analysis were conducted to establish the relationship between marketing strategies and tour operators' sales performance, as well as to examine the effectiveness of promotional strategies employed by tour operators for marketing and promoting township small tourism enterprises. The findings suggested that having a broad product line may not necessarily lead to improved sales performance. Efficient customer service had a significant positive effect on sales performance. Regression results were also presented for the influence on business growth in net profit performance. Focusing on customer needs and integrating activities for customer satisfaction had a non-significant or negative impact on sales performance. These findings provide insights into the importance of specific strategies for small tourism enterprises in achieving business growth in sales volume and net profit performance. Further research is recommended to explore the complex relationship between marketing strategies, customer satisfaction, and overall business performance in the context of small tourism enterprises.
Hospitality industry. Hotels, clubs, restaurants, etc. Food service, Business
For every indecomposable ordinal $α< ω_1$, we introduce a variant of Abraham forcing for adding a club in $ω_1$, which is $<α$-proper but not $α$-proper.
Food computing brings various perspectives to computer vision like vision-based food analysis for nutrition and health. As a fundamental task in food computing, food detection needs Zero-Shot Detection (ZSD) on novel unseen food objects to support real-world scenarios, such as intelligent kitchens and smart restaurants. Therefore, we first benchmark the task of Zero-Shot Food Detection (ZSFD) by introducing FOWA dataset with rich attribute annotations. Unlike ZSD, fine-grained problems in ZSFD like inter-class similarity make synthesized features inseparable. The complexity of food semantic attributes further makes it more difficult for current ZSD methods to distinguish various food categories. To address these problems, we propose a novel framework ZSFDet to tackle fine-grained problems by exploiting the interaction between complex attributes. Specifically, we model the correlation between food categories and attributes in ZSFDet by multi-source graphs to provide prior knowledge for distinguishing fine-grained features. Within ZSFDet, Knowledge-Enhanced Feature Synthesizer (KEFS) learns knowledge representation from multiple sources (e.g., ingredients correlation from knowledge graph) via the multi-source graph fusion. Conditioned on the fusion of semantic knowledge representation, the region feature diffusion model in KEFS can generate fine-grained features for training the effective zero-shot detector. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superior performance of our method ZSFDet on FOWA and the widely-used food dataset UECFOOD-256, with significant improvements by 1.8% and 3.7% ZSD mAP compared with the strong baseline RRFS. Further experiments on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO prove that enhancement of the semantic knowledge can also improve the performance on general ZSD. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/LanceZPF/KEFS.
Made Suryanatha Prabawa, I Wayan Widanan, Made Mas Surya Wiguna
et al.
As a quite popular Tourism Village, Bongkasa Pertiwi Village, located in Badung Regency, Bali Province, has experienced many spatial developments within its territory. The development was based on the findings of prior investigations show the phenomenon of spatial transformation of residents' houses both as a place for tourist accommodation and the economy. The spatial transformation that occurs increases the density of buildings and changes the spatial layout of the village area, so that in the future as a tourism village that will continue to grow, To find out, more research is require to measure the optimal level of spatial configuration in terms of inter-spatial connectivity and integrity in village spatial planning. The importance of this research is that the findings can be utilized as guidelines for village spatial design, making it more efficient and improving the quality of interaction between space users (residents and tourists). This study uses a Quantitative - Experimental method based on Space Syntax analysis. The results showed that the average level of connectivity was 2.19407 (highest "5"), integrity 0.286216 (highest "2.11"), and intellibility at R2: 0.0107275 (best close to "1"), The analysis' findings reveal a limited amount of connection between locations (space / area), so that social interaction that occurs between actors in village spatial planning is also low. These results indicate that the development of interaction center points is very much needed in the current Village Spatial Planning. The development must be based on the highest spatial connectivity-integration points based on space syntax analysis (found 4 area points) in order to obtain optimal results.
Hospitality industry. Hotels, clubs, restaurants, etc. Food service
The study employed a purposive sampling technique to identify multiple sources to systematically search, critically appraise and synthesise the matter of incorporating cultural heritage into the local tourism development strategy in Kwa-Ndebele. A total of 39 sources were consulted to achieve the objectives of the study. The results show that cultural heritage tourism can draw a large number of tourists due to its primary significance to the community. It manifests itself through lived realities, places, and objects that give true meaning, the purpose of existence, and a sense of belonging to the Ndebele culture. The sustainability of cultures can be used for positioning the destination for its food, cultural heritage landscape, artwork and history. However, tourism development has lagged because of conflicts of interest confronting different stakeholders within the local area. There is an element of fear among the local communities that cultural integration may destroy the authenticity of local cultures and natural landscapes. Even though tourism may lead to social problems, integrating cultural heritage into local tourism development is complicated. However, no evidence shows that incorporating culture into regional economic growth can have adverse effects. The paper concludes that a concerted effort must be made to minimise the negative consequences of cultural integration while unlocking local economic development opportunities for the growth of tourism and social good. The paper contributes to the body of knowledge on
incorporating cultural heritage into tourism development strategy to respond to the socio-economic needs of local communities.
Hospitality industry. Hotels, clubs, restaurants, etc. Food service, Business
Topicality. In the current realities of Covid-19 pandemic and martial law in Ukraine, every enterprise must focus on the processes transformation of provision and development, which allow to quickly respond to their activity, challenges and modifications in order to be attractive for investment.
The aim of this article is a comprehensive assessment of the investment attractiveness of hotel, restaurant and tourism businesses based on the usage of the offered three-stage system of financial indicators.
Research methods. The research uses common scientific and empirical techniques found on the systematic approach: abstract-logical, grouping, comparison, graphic, coefficient, modelling, analysis and synthesis, formalisation, generalisation ones.
Results. The system of comprehensive assessment of the investment attractiveness of hotel, restaurant and tourist business enterprises has been substantiated, which involves the use of key financial indicators that allow determining the level of liquidity and profitability of activities, as well as the level of financial stability and profitability of financial resources. The relationship between certain groups of indicators made it possible to construct identification matrices of the state of investment attractiveness of current activities, and the state of general investment attractiveness of enterprises, as well as a nine-quadrant zoning matrix of the general state of enterprise investment attractiveness. Approbation of the offered evaluation system, based on official statistical data, made it possible to analyse the dynamics of the state of investment attractiveness of hotel, restaurant and tourism businesses from the standpoint of internal financial threats for the period 2013–2021.
Conclusions and discussions. The practical use of the offered three-level evaluation system proves that it is a convenient, simple, clear and effective tool for diagnosing the level and the state of the enterprise investment attractiveness. The use of the offered approach can become an effective mechanism for managing the current activities of hotel, restaurant and tourism businesses, and an informative toolkit of factor analysis in the process of managing their investment attractiveness from the standpoint of internal financial threats.
The scientific novelty of obtained research results lies in the substantiation and approval of modern tools for comprehensive assessment of the investment attractiveness of hotel, restaurant and tourism enterprises from the standpoint of internal financial threats, which allows for effective management of it in the current period, and can also become the basis for forming strategic directions of financial development and forecasting the level of nvestment attractiveness for the prospective period.
Hospitality industry. Hotels, clubs, restaurants, etc. Food service, Commerce
Green Hotels are environmentally-friendly properties whose managers are eager to institute programs that help protect our earth, like saving water, saving energy, and reducing solid waste and pollution, while saving money too. The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic is having a devastating impact on the hotel industry worldwide. Thousands
of hotel firms have been bankrupted by the crisis, with countless hotel bookings cancelled due to travel restrictions and fears of contracting the coronavirus. This research aims to focus on the impact of Covid-19 on green hotel management, highlighting the negative and positive aspects of the pandemic on the green hotel sectors such as human resources management, room division sector, and the energy used in hotels. Four survey questionnaires were designed for hotel managers and managers of the front office, food and beverages, and marketing and sales,
with 120 forms. The results indicated that the Covid-19 pandemic has negatively affected all sectors of green hotels, low hotel occupancy rates, and many hotels have turned into quarantine hotels. The study represents the importance of activating crisis plan management in hotels, which contributes significantly to sensing the
occurrence of the crisis before it occurs and developing appropriate plans to confront it.
Hospitality industry. Hotels, clubs, restaurants, etc. Food service, Business
‘Small and medium-sized businesses represent around 80% of the tourism sector and are particularly at risk as millions of people around the world, including [those from] vulnerable communities, depend on tourism’ (UNWTO, 2020b). This study analysed the level of community participation in tourism in the Capricorn District of Limpopo. A positivist paradigm was adopted where quantitative data (descriptive statistics) was obtained through a structured questionnaire. Stratified random sampling, was adopted with a sample size of n=394. The results revealed that community participation is limited, because 62% of the respondents were not aware of the extent of tourism in the Capricorn District Municipality. Yet, community participation is driven by awareness, good management practices, and support from stakeholders, among other factors. Hence, a roadmap for the development and management of tourism in the Capricorn District Municipality area was developed for facilitating community participation in tourism development initiatives. The research limitation is that the research was conducted during lockdown, when many tourism businesses were experiencing great difficulties, with staff (especially part-time, seasonal workers) retrenched or placed on unpaid leave. In conclusion, tourism is a highly resilient sector that depends on the inclusion of several stakeholders and the ability of different countries, provinces, and destinations to respond to and recover from the crisis.
Keywords: Sustainable tourism, Responsible tourism, Community participation in Tourism, Community-based tourism
Hospitality industry. Hotels, clubs, restaurants, etc. Food service
Michael Gundall, Julius Stegmann, Mike Reichardt
et al.
Live migration of services is a prerequisite for various use cases that must be fulfilled for the realization of Industry 4.0. In addition, many different types of services need to provide mobility and consequently need to be migrated live. These can be offloaded algorithms from mobile devices, such as unmanned vehicles or robots, security services, communication services or classic control tasks. In particular, the latter place very high demands on determinism and latency. Here, it is of utmost importance that the downtime of the service is as low as possible. Since existing live migration approaches try to optimize multiple metrics such as downtime, migration time as well as energy consumption, which are equally relevant in the IT domain, it is not possible to use any of these approaches without adoptions. Therefore, a novel concept is proposed that builds on top of both existing migration approaches as well as virtualization technologies and aims primarily at minimizing service downtime. Furthermore, the concept is evaluated using a test environment. The results show that a sub-millisecond downtime can be achieved with the proposed concept. Moreover, the total migration time is in the range of several hundred milliseconds for the highest performance setting and two seconds for a non-invasive approach.
Innovation, knowledge sharing and trust culture contribute significantly to hotel small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the leisure and hospitality industry. However, most SMEs are family-owned, and staff cannot explore
and contribute to business growth. This article describes the effect of innovation, knowledge sharing, shared value and trust culture on hotel SMEs growth in Eswatini (former Swaziland). The study used a mixed explanatory
method where data collection and quantitative analysis occurred first, and followed by qualitative research. Overall the results revealed that innovation shared based, knowledge sharing, and trust culture have an impact on
small and medium hotels growth in Eswatini. The in-depth follow-up interview provided reasons for these effects. The study's empirical findings also suggest that the innovations, knowledge sharing and trust culture contribute to the growth of the hotel small and medium sector in Eswatini. The implications of the findings in this study for the growth of this sector are that the sector should develop policies and strategies that would enhance growth in the business. The limitation of the study was that it only focused only on purposefully selected small and medium entrepreneur’s hotel establishments in Eswatini. The study contributes to empirical studies on the hotel and tourism SMEs sector in developing countries.
Hospitality industry. Hotels, clubs, restaurants, etc. Food service, Business
Elisa Claire Alemán Carreón, Hugo Alberto Mendoza España, Hirofumi Nonaka
et al.
Since culture influences expectations, perceptions, and satisfaction, a cross-culture study is necessary to understand the differences between Japan's biggest tourist populations, Chinese and Western tourists. However, with ever-increasing customer populations, this is hard to accomplish without extensive customer base studies. There is a need for an automated method for identifying these expectations at a large scale. For this, we used a data-driven approach to our analysis. Our study analyzed their satisfaction factors comparing soft attributes, such as service, with hard attributes, such as location and facilities, and studied different price ranges. We collected hotel reviews and extracted keywords to classify the sentiment of sentences with an SVC. We then used dependency parsing and part-of-speech tagging to extract nouns tied to positive adjectives. We found that Chinese tourists consider room quality more than hospitality, whereas Westerners are delighted more by staff behavior. Furthermore, the lack of a Chinese-friendly environment for Chinese customers and cigarette smell for Western ones can be disappointing factors of their stay. As one of the first studies in the tourism field to use the high-standard Japanese hospitality environment for this analysis, our cross-cultural study contributes to both the theoretical understanding of satisfaction and suggests practical applications and strategies for hotel managers.
Ahmed A. Metwally, Ariel K. Leong, Aman Desai
et al.
Diet management is key to managing chronic diseases such as diabetes. Automated food recommender systems may be able to assist by providing meal recommendations that conform to a user's nutrition goals and food preferences. Current recommendation systems suffer from a lack of accuracy that is in part due to a lack of knowledge of food preferences, namely foods users like to and are able to eat frequently. In this work, we propose a method for learning food preferences from food logs, a comprehensive but noisy source of information about users' dietary habits. We also introduce accompanying metrics. The method generates and compares word embeddings to identify the parent food category of each food entry and then calculates the most popular. Our proposed approach identifies 82% of a user's ten most frequently eaten foods. Our method is publicly available on (https://github.com/aametwally/LearningFoodPreferences)