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, Digitization in 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, digitization in 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

SmartCulTour

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

SmartCulTour

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.

NTG

Digitourism

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

Digitourism

Overtourism

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

Overtourism

SCITHOS

Smart City Hospitality (SCITHOS) seeks to support cities to come up with policies and solutions to deal with these issues and so-called overtourism.
 

SCITHOS

SASTDes

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

SASTDes

Vacations for quality of life

Improve happiness and quality of life by smoothing out the travel experience and holding on to that holiday feeling.

Vacations for quality of life

Praxis of Informal Tourism Entrepreneurs

Are informal tourism entrepreneurs actually marginalised? How do informal tourism entrepreneurs contribute to changes in society?

Praxis of Informal Tourism Entrepreneurs

Beware of the chameleons

How does innovation function in organising change in tourism?

Praxis of Informal Tourism Entrepreneurs

Klimaforsk

The overarching aim of the project is to enable a sustainable adaptation to climate change of the nature based tourism industry in Norway. 

Klimaforsk

Making sense of change

The role of employees’ mental maps in developing perspectives of organisational change in the Dutch travel industry.

Praxis of Informal Tourism Entrepreneurs