Rethinking assignment design in hospitality education

Restokisat is the national skills competition for hospitality management (restonomi) students at Finnish universities of applied sciences. Usually, 8 to 10 universities of applied sciences send one team each, and every team completes a pre-task before the event and two tasks on site. We followed the 2026 competition as benchmarkers because we will be designing the tasks for next year’s competition RESTO 2027.

In Mikkeli, a student team sat around a table, comparing their assignment with the other competition briefs. Their task was to redesign a customer journey, but the discussion moved away from touchpoints and personas toward a different frustration.

The assignments shared the same hospitality context, yet each brief demanded a completely different way of thinking. One case focused on experience design, another on operational efficiency, and a third on commercial decision-making.

Each new assignment forced teams to abandon the thinking model they had just built. One student pointed out that the team had already constructed an operational logic for the first task, only to discard it in the next case. Another observed that the real challenge had become identifying what kind of thinking each assignment expected.

This disconnect matters. Professional practice rarely separates customer experience, operations, staffing, communication, and revenue into isolated domains. A hospitality professional handles these tensions simultaneously and one decision often impacts on many areas. We argue that assignments, competition briefs included, teach more when each task inherits the decisions and constraints of the previous one.

At Haaga-Helia, we see the same pattern on courses run by several teachers: when they do not coordinate, each writes their own assignment and the tasks can end up unrelated. Our experience economy courses at Haaga-Helia show the reverse. We have taught them together for several years.

With the RESTO 2027 concept, each task builds on the last. This way we see students carry their earlier decisions into each new task

Diagnosing the real problem

Outcome-based education has been shown to strengthen students’ ability to make decisions in complex and unstable environments (Guo et al. 2023), while experiential and simulation-based learning lets students test decisions and see their consequences in realistic settings (Price-Howard & Lewis 2023; Masset & Weisskopf 2025).

The Restokisat 2026 briefs introduced layered conditions into otherwise familiar service-design tasks: staffing shortages, international family target groups, and rainy off-season weekends. Students had to decide which compromises mattered most.

A late checkout looked like convenience to the guest, lost room inventory to revenue management, and a scheduling problem to housekeeping. Students saw that service quality depends on how well these functions coordinate.

Service design pedagogy treats systems thinking and stakeholder interaction as learning objectives (Ding et al. 2023), and experiential learning research in hospitality education links meaningful learning to integrated, real-world problems (Sebby & Brown 2020). Within a single brief, Restokisat 2026 already asked for this. The weak point was the step from one brief to the next, where a team’s operational logic was left behind.

From assignments to integrated thinking

The gap between classroom learning and industry expectations in hospitality education is well documented. A scoping review of 111 studies from 2000 to 2021 found that employers, educators and students perceive the competencies needed in entry-level hospitality jobs differently. (Nguyen et al. 2023.)

Assignments narrow this gap when each new task starts from the decisions of the previous one. Programmatic assessment treats learning as a similar sequence of connected decisions (Baartman et al. 2022), and Costa et al. (2025) describe education itself as a complex service system. Seen this way, assignments build integrated professional judgement.

We are applying three principles as we prepare the RESTO 2027 tasks. All three tasks share one case business, so the guest journey a team designs in the pre-task becomes the plan to follow on site. Conditions change between tasks. For example, a staffing shortage or a group booking arrives as an update to the team’s own plan. Judges assess the revision, and each team explains in a short decision log what it changed, what it kept and which trade-off it accepted.

The approach has a cost. A weak pre-task decision follows the team into every later task, and connected work is harder for judges to compare. A shared situation update at the start of each on-site task gives all teams the same baseline while they still adapt their own work.

On a regular course, the smallest version of this approach requires one change: let the second assignment start from the output of the first, add one new constraint and grade the reasoning behind the revision. The grade then would reflect students’ ability to think when operational priorities begin to conflict.