The Ethics of a Profession, Vanishing Mastery and the Silent Collapse of Merit
Tansel Tercan, PhD
11 October 2026 | Istanbul
Countless books have been written on how to become a tourism professional. How to be a good manager, how to satisfy the guest, how to run a hotel profitably and how to grow a brand have all been explained at great length.
This time I will start from the opposite end.
Because today the greatest problem in tourism is not that we do not know how to become tourism professionals; it is that examples of how not to become one keep multiplying and, more troubling still, that these examples are at times rewarded as success.
Positions once earned through mastery are today sometimes won through visibility. Rhetoric can take the place of knowledge, display the place of experience, and obedience the place of professional loyalty. In an order where those who know their craft fall silent and those who merely appear to know it rise, it is not only the management mindset that changes; the moral standards of the profession wear away as well.
Yet hotelkeeping is one of humanity’s oldest relationships of trust.
A stranger knocks on your door, lays his head on your pillow, entrusts his table to you, and leaves his safety and peace of mind in your care…
All of this goes far beyond any commercial transaction.
Guest, employee, supplier and investor are parties to the same invisible contract: Trust.
A hotel may have its stars, its brand, its architecture and its capital. But without trust, all of this is nothing more than a well lit stage.
Because a hotel is built with concrete; hospitality is built with people.
And in a profession where one human being is entrusted to another, character matters as much as knowledge, conscience as much as talent, and ethics as much as success.
The question we must ask today is not only how one becomes a tourism professional.
The real question is this: When we forget how to be tourism professionals, what kind of tourism is left?
Where the Shop Window Defeats Mastery
This profession was once a long journey from apprenticeship to mastery.
No one became a manager without knowing the silence of the front desk at night, without feeling the heat of the kitchen, without witnessing the invisible labour of housekeeping, without taking responsibility while looking an angry guest in the eye.
The title walked behind the effort, not in front of it.
Today, however, the order sometimes seems to have been reversed.
A carefully chosen suit, a meticulously prepared presentation, impressive rhetoric and relationships built with the right people can overtake years of professional accumulation.
Of course appearance matters. Elegance, the ability to represent and personal care are inseparable parts of hospitality. The problem arises when appearance turns into a certificate of competence.
Because a person’s ability to present himself well is no proof that he knows his job well.
A management language with no grounding in the field will sooner or later face its first real crisis.
More dangerous still is the way professional incompetence protects itself.
Those who cannot compete with knowledge sometimes begin to compete with reputation. Instead of trying to understand a more experienced professional, they choose to discredit him. A whisper, a sentence passed on incompletely, an insinuation that sows doubt…
And so success begins to be measured not by the value created but by the perception constructed.
The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital offers an important intellectual framework for understanding this situation. Title, status, network and visibility can turn into sources of power. But when these sources of power become detached from genuine professional competence, the institution begins to make decisions against its own future.
Because visibility is not the same thing as merit.
The most dangerous form of ignorance is not being unaware of what one does not know. It is gaining enough power to treat knowledge as a threat.
The collapse of a profession does not begin when those who do not know the job multiply; it begins when those who do know it start to be seen as unnecessary.
Where Obedience Is Mistaken for Loyalty
It would be too easy to place the responsibility for this picture on incompetent managers alone.
The question that really needs to be asked is this:
Who selects them, who promotes them, who rewards them?
Some investors who enter tourism with capital earned in other sectors may regard the hotel merely as a real estate investment and management as a chain of command.
Yet owning a hotel and being a hotelier are not the same thing.
Acquiring ownership of a building does not automatically mean possessing the knowledge needed to manage the human relationships lived inside it.
The greatest misconception of some investors is to see the person who obeys them as loyal, and the professional who warns them as a problem.
The experienced manager is found expensive. Because he does not only ask for a salary; he also asks for professional standards, working discipline and independence in decision making. When necessary, he objects. He opposes the wrong budget, the unrealistic target, the practice that wears employees out, or the decision that endangers the guest’s trust.
By contrast, the manager who approves every instruction may at first glance seem easier, cheaper and more agreeable.
But here an important truth is overlooked:
The most valuable safeguard of an investor’s money is sometimes the “no” his manager has the courage to say.
Professional loyalty is not agreeing with everything the boss says. It is protecting the institution’s future, reputation and resources.
The investor sets goals, allocates resources, evaluates performance and holds people accountable. The professional manager produces decisions within the scope of his expertise and responsibility. A healthy relationship is built when each side recognises the authority and knowledge of the other.
Of course there are also investors who invest their capital in the sector with respect, who uphold merit, who never give up on training and who trust their professionals. Lasting corporate cultures usually grow out of their understanding.
To understand a good investor, there is no need to look only at his financial statements.
It is enough to look at how much importance he gives to staff areas, how he views the training budget, whether he hears the voice of his employees, and how he relates to the professionals who object to him.
Because in a well managed hotel, human resources are not an ordinary line in the cost table but the fundamental value that carries the future of the business.
There is no such thing as a cheap manager.
There is only a manager whose bill has not yet arrived.
The Invisible Anatomy of Professional Decay
The moral collapse of an institution rarely begins with a great scandal.
It begins with a small lie.
With a piece of information given incompletely, an irregularity that is ignored, an employee promoted without deserving it, a manager who claims someone else’s work…
Behaviours that first look like exceptions turn into habits over time.
Then the habits become the unwritten rules of the institution.
And one day no one remembers why they were wrong.
Weak integrity, self interest, arrogance, jealousy, evasion of responsibility and lack of empathy are not merely individual flaws of character. When rewarded by management, they turn into institutional patterns of behaviour.
If the manager who embellishes the figures is praised, the employee who reports accurately will in time learn to stay silent.
If the person who claims others’ work rises, teamwork gives way to a struggle of personal interests.
If favouritism becomes normal, merit after a while turns into a nice word used only in human resources presentations.
If conflicts of interest in supplier relations are ignored, the institution’s purchasing decisions become questionable on ethical grounds as much as on economic ones.
If mobbing, threats and management by fear are considered methods of success, employees begin to develop not their productivity but their skills of self protection.
The common result of all this is the same:
The institution loses the people who would develop it while rewarding the behaviours that sustain the existing broken order.
An important distinction must not be forgotten here either.
Professional knowledge is not an automatic guarantee of moral character. A very experienced manager can act out of self interest; an employee who is just starting out can have a high sense of responsibility.
So the issue is not only being knowledgeable.
It is being able to unite knowledge with virtue, authority with responsibility, and success with justice.
Aristotle’s understanding of virtue gains meaning here. According to him, virtuous actions become part of character through repetition and habit.
A person learns justice by acting justly and moderation by acting with moderation.
The same principle applies to institutional life.
When a manager admits his own mistake, he strengthens the culture of responsibility. When a chef shares success with his team, he makes justice visible. When a general manager applies the rules first to himself, he lays the foundation of institutional trust.
Because employees watch their managers’ behaviour far more than they read the value statements hung on the wall.
A manager is listened to when he speaks; he is imitated when he lives.
The Most Dangerous Collapse: Being Able to Justify the Wrong
Perhaps the most dangerous of the behaviours that threaten professional ethics is a person’s ability to find a reasonable justification for his own wrongdoing.
This form of defence, called rationalisation in psychology, appears in corporate life in very familiar sentences:
“Everyone does it.”
“No one gets hurt.”
“I deserved this.”
“There is no other way to manage.”
“That is how the market works.”
These sentences look innocent.
Yet each one is an invisible curtain a person draws between himself and his own conscience.
The one who says “everyone does it” ignores the existence of those who do not.
The one who says “no one gets hurt” does not ask in whose life the harm accumulates.
The one who says “I deserved it” may forget that what is deserved is tied not only to personal expectation but also to justice.
Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the banality of evil, read with full respect for the weight of their historical context, can serve here as an important warning: when people stop thinking about the moral consequences of what they do, they may begin to hand their responsibility over to others.
In corporate life, too, the danger is not only the wrong decision.
It is that the wrong decision is no longer questioned.
Not everyone in an institution needs to be ill intentioned. Sometimes the silence of good people is enough for wrong practices to continue.
The person who turns a blind eye to a small irregularity today may tomorrow lose the courage to speak up against a greater wrong.
Because conscience, too, is a faculty of judgement that can wither when it is not used.
For this reason every manager should ask himself three questions before making an important decision:
- Can I openly defend this decision in front of my guests and my employees?
- Can I explain it tomorrow to my team with all its reasons?
- If everyone in this institution behaved the same way, could the institution survive?
The third question can be linked to Immanuel Kant’s principle of a universalisable morality.
It is not enough for an action merely to benefit us. We must also consider whether we could want it to become a rule of conduct valid for everyone.
This is where professional ethics begins: not where self interest ends, but where self interest and principle confront each other.
A person’s greatest moral defeat is not knowing that he has done wrong; it is beginning to believe that his wrong is right.
When the Masters Leave, the Memory of the Profession Leaves Too
One of the most important risks facing the tourism sector today is that trained professionals are drifting away from the profession.
This loss cannot be explained by employment statistics alone.
Because when an experienced manager leaves a hotel, it is not only a position that becomes vacant.
Sometimes years of accumulated institutional memory, an intuition distilled from hundreds of crises and a mastery that no training book can fully contain also walk out of the door.
A cook does not judge the quality of an ingredient by technical measures alone; he feels it with a sensitivity gained over the years.
A housekeeping manager assesses the cleanliness of a room not only with a checklist but by seeing details the guest has not yet noticed.
An experienced receptionist can sense approaching dissatisfaction from a small change in a guest’s voice.
And a good general manager can understand that something is going wrong inside the institution before the crisis is reflected in the figures.
Michael Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowledge is valuable for explaining this professional accumulation.
A person cannot turn everything he knows into words, instructions or procedures.
Some knowledge can only be learned by working together, by observing, by experiencing and by growing up beside a master.
That is why mastery in tourism is not merely a technical skill.
It is the memory of a profession passed down from generation to generation.
Businesses that lose their trained people today are losing not only their experienced employees, but also the teachers of the masters they would raise in the future.
Without masters, no apprentices are raised.
Without apprentices, the profession struggles to reproduce its own knowledge.
And after a while there may be many managers in businesses, but it becomes hard to find people who can truly guide.
A profession begins to lose its future when it first stops learning from its past.
From Ahilik to Today: The Professional Discipline We Have Forgotten
One of the deep rooted traditions of professional ethics in these lands is Ahilik.
Ahilik developed an understanding that did not separate economic activity from moral responsibility.
Being a master was not merely being able to do a job well.
It meant remaining faithful to what was entrusted, keeping the right measure, respecting the rights of others, trading honestly and raising the person who would come after you.
The profession was not only a means of earning a living but also a discipline of life through which a person developed his character.
The story associated with poor goods and fraudulent trade in Ahi culture, of a craftsman’s shoe being thrown onto the roof, reminds us that professional reputation was built on trust.
Many of the management concepts we use today can also be read as modern expressions of this old moral responsibility.
Institutional trust.
Ethical leadership.
Sustainable human resources.
Stakeholder responsibility.
Service quality.
At the centre of all these concepts lies, in fact, the same question:
To what extent does a person fulfil his responsibility towards another person?
The caravanserai tradition of Anatolia also holds a special place in the historical memory of hospitality.
The safety and rest of the traveller and the meeting of his basic needs were seen not merely as a commercial transaction but also as a social responsibility.
The human essence of what we today call the guest experience lies here.
Caring for a person not because of his ability to pay, but because he is a human being.
Kant’s principle of treating a human being never merely as a means but always also as an end in himself expresses the same idea on a different philosophical plane.
An understanding that sees the guest only as room revenue, the employee only as a personnel cost and the manager only as an executor of orders reduces the value of a human being to his economic function.
Yet hospitality is not a profession that can be sustained by instrumentalising people.
Because the raw material of this profession is people, its capital is trust, and its reputation is ethics.
Today our hotels have grown. Our brands have multiplied. Our technology has advanced. New investments are rising all over the world.
But the question we must ask ourselves remains the same:
While enlarging our buildings, have we also been able to enlarge our professional discipline?
Who Pays the Price?
The price of the erosion of professional ethics is never limited to one person.
First the guest pays.
Because service quality is not understood at the brightest moment of welcome, but when the first serious problem arises.
Smiling is easy.
But admitting a mistake, taking responsibility, finding a solution and winning back the guest’s trust require true professionalism.
A guest may not forgive every mistake; but what usually drives him away is not so much the mistake itself as the indifference he encounters.
Then the employee pays.
In an institution where merit is not rewarded, a talented person first struggles, then grows tired, and then either leaves or falls silent.
This is the most dangerous outcome of all.
Because the silence of employees does not always mean they are satisfied.
Sometimes it only shows that they no longer believe anything will change.
Next the investor pays.
The savings thought to have been achieved at the start through low salaries can come back over time as rising staff turnover, higher recruitment and training costs, falling service quality, a worn out brand reputation and lost guest loyalty.
In the end the country pays.
Because tourism is not merely a sector that earns foreign currency.
It is a country’s face turned towards the world.
It is one of the first points of contact a foreigner has with that country’s people, culture, daily life and hospitality.
A negative experience in one hotel can sometimes affect the perception not only of that business but of the destination as a whole.
But on the other side of the scale there is a much stronger truth.
In this profession, ethics is not only a value to be protected but also the foundation of long term success.
A business that honestly admits its mistake and strives to make amends can rebuild trust.
An employee who sees his effort rewarded can take ownership of his responsibilities more firmly.
A guest who feels valued remembers not only the service but also the care shown to him.
This is how trust is formed.
Where behaviour confirms what advertising promises, brand reputation becomes lasting.
Because true hospitality means knowing how to value a person before trying to please him.
So How Does One Become a Tourism Professional?
Perhaps we have already given the answer while describing how not to become one.
Being a tourism professional is not just about having a diploma, a title or many years behind you.
It is knowing the kitchen of the profession.
It is being able, when necessary, to set a table, listen to a complaint, understand an employee’s effort and see the human story behind a figure.
Being a tourism professional is protecting the one who tells the truth.
It is listening to the employee who does not hide bad news but brings it in time.
It is keeping merit ahead of closeness, effort ahead of display, and knowledge ahead of obedience.
It is seeing training not as an expense but as an investment in the future.
It is the manager first showing the behaviour he expects from his subordinates.
It is the owner of capital trusting his professional, and the professional answering that trust with knowledge, honesty and accountability.
Being a tourism professional is doing your job right even where no one is watching.
Because the real test of character begins not in the moments when a person is supervised, but in the moments when he is not.
I have a word for my young colleagues.
Shortcuts may look tempting. Visibility may bring quick results. Being close to the right people may open doors.
But professional life is not only about the doors that open.
What matters is what you do behind those doors, whose lives you touch, which responsibilities you take on and what kind of name you leave behind.
Remember, the most valuable professional capital you will carry for a lifetime is your name.
I also have a word for the masters.
Do not hide what you know.
Teach the young person growing up beside you not only how the work is done, but also why it must be done right.
Show how a table is set, how a guest is listened to, how a budget is read and how an employee’s dignity is protected.
Because mastery is not only a success achieved in the past.
It is a trust left to the future.
A master becomes a true master on the day he is no longer afraid of raising someone better than himself.
What Remains?
One day all titles will be left behind.
The epithets on business cards will be erased. The names on the doors of executive offices will change. The managers applauded today will be replaced by others.
Hotels will change hands.
Brands will be restructured.
Stars, signboards, management systems and technologies will be renewed.
But one thing will remain.
The courtesy a guest remembers.
The fairness an employee cannot forget.
The words of a master that helped a young person hold on to the profession.
The respect one human being shows to another.
This is the true legacy of a profession.
Tourism is not merely an economic activity in which rooms are sold, tables are set and services are provided.
It is an ethical arena in which the trust of one human being in another is tested anew every day.
That is why the future of the profession cannot be sought only in new investments, big brands, showy projects or growing bed capacities.
The future lies with those who protect knowledge, who respect effort, who do not stay silent in the face of wrong, and who regard raising someone better than themselves as a professional responsibility.
I am hopeful about the future of this profession.
Because there are still people who, at some hour of the night, with no one watching, do their duty properly.
There are still employees who count the guest’s satisfaction as their own success, masters who do not withhold what they know from a young colleague, and investors who know how to grow their capital with respect for human labour.
There are still professionals who value a guest’s thanks above all awards.
This profession rises on their shoulders.
And let us not forget:
Authority can be given to run a hotel.
A title can be given to represent a brand.
Capital may be enough to own a building.
But to become a tourism professional, one must first earn people’s trust.
Because professions enter history not only through the work done, but also through the character of the people who do it.
One can become a hotel owner. One can be appointed a manager. A title can be bought. But mastery cannot be bought.
And perhaps the most important thing to be said at the end of this whole article is this:
One does not become a tourism professional by silencing those who know, applauding the incompetent, and counting obedience as loyalty, display as merit and self interest as success.
At most, one becomes the owner of a building, the occupant of a position, the bearer of a title.
Whereas the true tourism professional is the one who can see the stranger entering through his door not as a revenue item but as a human being entrusted to him.
Because tourism, before it is the practice of a profession, is the bearing of responsibility towards people.
And a person chooses his profession; but in the end, the ethics of his profession reveal who that person is.
Tansel Tercan, PhD
11 October 2026 | Istanbul
This article was first published in Turkish on 5gvirusnews.com.