Q1. Explore different types of clubs and theme parks. Briefly described their service offerings.
There are many types of clubs within a living area for citizens to entertain or meet up people especially those have similar hobbies and interest. Also different types of club may target different members and offer various services. The types of clubs are as follow.
Clubs
1. Country Club
It is usually privately owned with 2 or more types of membership. Most clubs have swimming pools, golf ,tennis courts and gymnastic room for its members.Beside of providing various recreational sports, it also have dinning and entertaining activities. Sometime, it holds catering services to such as wedding ceremony. Citizen who has full membership enables members to use all the facilities all the time. While social memberships only allows member to use the social facilities. Other forms of membership can include weekday and weekend memberships.
E.g. Hong Kong Country Club
2. Sports Club
It mainly focus on providing one or more recreational sports facilities to its members. The club provide indoor or outdoor sport facilities such as basketball, squash, tennis, swimming , gymnastic etc.
3. Hobby Club
It is the place where for members with similar interest to gather and communicate. Its hard core facilities are quite similar to those in sports and social club. However, personal engagement is the most important to member.
E.g The Hong Kong Golf Club
4. Social Activities Club
It is a club that mainly offer various activities for member focusing on social intersections by participating in the events. The club may hold different events in a broad range such as dancing, art designing, science or even charity work. As the nature of the club involve lots of social interactions, members tend to single more than married.
E.g. Skating Club
5. Professional Club
It is partly social entertaining and partly professional in nature. The society provide opportunities for members having advanced education, exchanging business contact and research communications.
E.g. PCMA Professional Club Marketing Association
6. University Club
It is usually a meeting place for faculty or society members to stay along within an educational institution especially in an university. The activities are performed by students outside the regular classes time. Members will participate different activities within the club for social interaction, conversation and intellectual exchange.
E.g. Drama club, dance club, English club
7. Service Club
It is usually held by voluntary non-profit organisation where members meet together to perform volunteer works. The club mainly focus on their service aim at first and second on their members’ benefits.
E.g. Rotary International
Aside from different clubs for entertainment, theme parks are the other place that can entertain citizen. Here are different types of theme parks.
Theme parks
1. National Park
It is park that contain protected areas of the city’s unspoiled landscapes and native plants and animals.The park usually offer visitor facilities and tour walk in order to provide conservation and entertainment aside from education.
E.g. Banff National park in Canada
2. Regional Park
It is usually provide open public spaces for cultural activities or recreational use.
E.g. Sha Tin Park
3. Traditional Park
It is park that located near the countryside providing natural environment for citizen.
E.g. Wolmi Traditional Park in Korea
4. Amusement Park
It provides amusement rides and many entertainment attractions assembled for the purpose of entertaining a group of people such as family. It is a park where operate to satisfy adults, teenagers or even kids.
E.g. Ocean Park
5. Water Park
It mainly provides water playing area such as slides, water playground, lazy river etc.
E.g. Legoland Floride Water Park
Q2. Choose one taught topic you’re interested and do further research.
The topic I would like to address through this reflection is, how recreational activities contribute to our wellbeing and other beneficial reasons that has the government investing in them. There is no doubt that with Hong Kong’s work ethic, employees are prone to burnout and stress than, say an employee from Netherlands, where its rumored to have the shortest work week. And that is not without leverage, with an average 29 working hours per week and a decent average annual wage of $47,000. If we were to draw a comparison between the Netherlands and Hong Kong, it would almost seem that Hong Kongers are workaholics with no life outside of work, with an average 49 hours a week, Hong Kong is almost double that of the Netherlands. So, is this why the government is ever so compliant and maybe even ‘eager’ to invest in recreational projects.
Yes, that is one reason, but also recreational projects, strictly speaking, theme parks attract a lot of revenue and tourism. So you could say the government is killing two birds with one stone! And a census taken in 2011 showed that “Ocean Park had 5.9 million visitors in the year ending June (…) the 34-year-old, government-owned theme park recorded annual revenue of HK$1.2 billion” (Chris Ip, SCMP). Hence there’s no doubt that beyond the emotional and physical wellbeing of Hong Kong’s population, the Hong Kong government has another agenda, and you cannot necessarily blame them because the revenue generated from tourism (and we are assuming here that the revenue from Ocean Park partly contributes to that number) makes up a large part of Hong Kong’s economy and Hong Kong spares no expenses in investing in this sector, with the total tourism expenditure associated with inbound tourism reaching HK$7,333 per capita in 2011.
However, one can then argue that with the tourism numbers going up and the revenue made from that sector contributing to a flourishing economy, doesn’t it eventually come right back to Hong Kongers’ well being, because with a better economy its their livelihood that’s going to be benefitting. Concluding on that note, the theme parks in Hong Kong definitely play a big role in improving people’s wellbeing and bettering the economy.
Q3. Find out more recent trends and new development in recreation and leisure.
Changes linked with the population diversity
1. Age diversity
Population structure changed dramatically since the 21st century. With population explosions and diversity trends, the demands of recreation and leisure will be changed correspondingly. As there is a growing number of foreigners in almost every country in the world, the things people do for recreation and for leisure started to change.
2. Aging society
More and more people are having a prolonging life than ever before, which increase the society's demand for entertainment and recreation. As a result, a main part of customers in recreation industry are elderly people.
3. Family trips became popular
Nowadays more and more family can afford a whole-family trip. They are willing to gather family member together, take a long term vacation aboard, which also triggers changes in the type of recreation. For example, Disney Resort has places for family activities in their hotels.
Government investments and longer public time
In order to improve society welfare, the government has spent a growing amount of resources on public recreation facilities and activities. For example, many cities have many public gymnasium, which has a relatively low entrance price. Additionally, the opening time of these facilities has been increasing, for the benefit of the general public. In addition, the government also organizes many recreational activities. Taking Hong Kong government as an example, there are courses of sailing, hiking, archery etc., with a very low fee.
Reflection:
This week we learned recreation, theme parks and clubs. The topic we studied in this lecture is related to our daily life. However, before this lecture, we do not know there are so many knowledge related to hospitality management in these industries.
Firstly, as the life becomes more stressful, recreation plays a very important role in our daily life. We called the recreation process as bonding. Bonding increases the interpersonal feeling and results to the personal growth and development. Besides, the leisure time makes people enjoy their life and release the stress.
Secondly, we know that there are two different types of recreation, one is the government-sponsored recreation and another is commercial recreation. Under these two types, there are different kinds of recreation activities.
Thirdly, we understand that there are different types of clubs and theme parks. The operation and management are similar to the hotel management meanwhile it is also different from the hotel management. Besides, we know that different them parks and clubs have different functions, target consumers and operation way.
Fourthly, we think that recreation and leisure will become more important in the future as people pay more attention to quality of life. And the industry may develop very fast. In addition, the government may invest more in this industry.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Hong_Kong
http://www.scmp.com/article/987807/record-visitors-and-revenue-ocean-park
http://samples.jbpub.com/9780763781590/81590_CH13_FINAL.pdf
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The Venetian Macao is a glamorous hotel as well as a casino resort located in Macau, which owned by the Les Vegas Sands. It is the largest casino in the world, and also the largest single structure hotel building in Asia. 
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