*2.2. The Role of the Hotel and Restaurant Industry*

The hotel industry provides hotel services and organizes short-term accommodation rental services at hotels, campsites, motels, student motels, and guest houses, etc., including restaurant services. In general, the hotel industry provides accommodation and food services for tourists. The hotel and restaurant industry is considered a major component of hospitality and an important components of tourist infrastructure. Hospitality, especially in its commercial incarnation as the "hotel", has emerged as the hub, or the most vital segment, of infrastructure facilities for the travel and tourism industry anywhere around the globe. Raina (2005) considers that, along with transportation, hotels, motels, and restaurants are the physical elements of tourism infrastructure. Meanwhile, the Tourism and Transport Forum (2012) points out that hotels are a significant component of tourism's social infrastructure and Pearce and Wu (2015) consider them part of the hard infrastructure of tourism.

Like transportation infrastructure, the hotel industry's role (including the restaurant industry) in attracting tourists and developing the tourism industry is evidenced by many recent empirical studies. It is also considered an important component in the tourism supply chain (Ghaderi et al. 2018) and many studies have used rooms as a proxy for tourism infrastructure (Khadaroo and Seetanah 2007b, 2008; Seetanah and Khadaroo 2009; Seetanah et al. 2011; Lim et al. 2019).
