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This study seeks to address the convergence of boundaries in Tourism, Hospitality, Events, and Leisure (THEL) fields and shared objects of study. We offer a synthesized definition of THEL and discuss a set of meta-concepts that defines the core and boundaries of THEL. We argue that hospitality, experience, and place are three unifying constructs upon which all THEL scholarship activities and practice fields are established. This paper invites a system-wide conversation to stimulate prescient thinking regarding academic discipline reassessment and progress at a time when technological and societal forces are transforming work, life, and education. This research will engender new perspectives to structure research and scholarship. In the context of learning, this paper will impact the reassessment of curricular structures to provide a curriculum that is relevant and adaptive to the changing needs of contemporary society.

This study empirically examines the impact of food sharing on tourists’ interpersonal relationship development, sense of authenticity, and subjective wellbeing using two experimental studies. The two experiments showed that tourist food sharing improves interpersonal relationships, tourist perceptions of experience authenticity, and wellbeing. Two culturally divergent tourist groups were compared: US tourists and Chinese tourists. The results show that U.S. tourists evaluated food sharing higher regarding its impact on authenticity and wellbeing than their Chinese counterparts. this study contributes to the theoretical delineation of conviviality as a phenomenon, with specific reference to the identification of its impacts on tourist experiences.

The tourism recovery in the post-pandemic era has attracted major attention from scholars, focusing on people’s potential travel intentions and behaviors to visit destinations physically. However, people’s behaviors of engaging in virtual tourism post-pandemic have received little attention, and its value as a substitute for direct traveling has been ignored. By treating the substitutability of virtual tourism as a subjective receptivity of consumers, this research aims to examine consumers’ perception of virtual tourism as a substitute for direct traveling and its relationship with their intention to travel physically or virtually post-pandemic. A positive relationship is hypothesized, and the moderation role of past adoption of virtual tourism is also examined. A sample of 331 responses was collected through MTurk and analyzed using linear regression models. The results showed that consumers’ higher perception of virtual tourism as a substitute would increase their intention to travel physically or virtually post-pandemic, with the intention to travel virtually much higher than the intention to travel physically. The moderation role of past adoption of virtual tourism is also validated, with people who adopted virtual tourism during the pandemic having reduced intention to travel physically and virtually post-pandemic. The results of this research lend both theoretical as well as practical implications to academia and the practitioners as to how to plan and market destination experience-based products.