Tourism Research

In this domain, we study the challenges and opportunities of tourism, and its impacts on consumers, organizations and society. The 3 focus areas in tourism research and projects are: Sustainable Tourism and Transport, Social Impacts of Tourism, Digital Transformation of Tourism.

Tourism is a fast-growing economic sector and one of the world’s largest industries. Tourism offers numerous opportunities for destinations and businesses worldwide. Perhaps the greatest value is to tourists themselves, who depend on their holidays to experience the best moments of their lives. Tourism may contribute greatly to people’s overall quality of life. At the same time, continuous growth of tourism is not as obvious as it used to be.

Nowadays, tourism has to deal with major global challenges such as its environmental effects, including the share of tourism transport on climate change (e.g., aviation, cruise holidays). Also, unique ecosystems and vulnerable destinations may be negatively impacted by the growth of tourism. Sustainability of tourism and minimization of its footprint has become very important. Furthermore, the social impacts of tourism, sometimes lumped together under the term ‘overtourism’, are not to be denied. Lastly, digital transformation of tourism causes disrupting innovations and generates significant market changes for companies and challenges ethics and the privacy of consumers.

In our research, we aim to contribute to the understanding of these kind of impacts of tourism, and to support society and industry in determining strategies to manage these impacts.

Featured projects

MONA

MONA will stimulate sustainable tourism in and around nature areas in North-West Europe which benefits nature, the environment, visitors, and the local economy.

SmartCulTour

SmartCulTour will propose and validate innovative interventions directed at sustainable cultural tourism that supports the development of European regions.

Tourban

Accelerating the capacity and innovation of SMEs for sustainable urban tourism.

Next Tourism Generation

Next Tourism Generation Alliance (NTG) aims to respond to future skills needs by providing concrete innovative and highly relevant emerging products, processes and tools.

Digitourism

Many business intelligence surveys demonstrate that Digital Realities are becoming a huge market trend in many sectors, such as in tourism.

Overtourism

This study addresses the complex phenomenon of overtourism in the EU.

Radar for the City Feeling

This project develops a toolkit to assess the value of city museums, in non-economic terms, to residents and visitors.

SASTDes

How can sustainability assessments effectively and efficiently contribute to the sustainable development of tourism destinations and tourism products?