For Professionals from Professionals - Knowledge sharing at the Travel Industry Workshop

On the occasion of the Ferien Messe Wien, the Travel Industry Club Austria brought together around 250 tourism scholars, students, and travel industry members for a workshop and networking event at Vienna’s Grand Hotel.

 

Kicking the day off was the Travel Industry Workshop, where faculty from the Department of Tourism and Service Management presented their research.

 

MODUL University was very well represented, showcasing our research output in a variety of tourism-related fields. As part of the ‘Science Lab’, faculty presented the latest developments in TourMIS, the MU-created a marketing information system for tourism managers which provides information and decision support through on-line tourism survey data as well as various tools to transform data into management information.

 

Our faculty gave a number of individual research presentations at the workshops including ‘’Identification of the drivers of Airbnb demand’’ from Ulrich Gunter and Irem Önder and a talk in German on the subject of sustainable food on holiday titled ‘’Spaghetti, Tofu oder Bio-Schnitzel? – Wie nachhaltig ist unsere Ernährung im Urlaub?’’ from Dagmar Lund-Durlacher and Hannes Antonschmidt. Lidija Lalicic, recent recipient of the Dr. Maria-Schaumayer award for female researchers, spoke on ‘’Open Innovation in Tourism,’’ and Bozana Zekan presented her work on ‘’Measuring the Performance of Tourism Destinations: What Can We Learn from the European Cities?’’.

 

During the workshop there were also speakers from industry giants such as Google and AVIS, as well as international roster of speakers from universities across Austria.

 

‘’The event was well attended and interesting topics were discussed such as sustainable tourism and sharing economy,’’ says Dr. Önder. ‘’It was quite an important event for the Austrian tourism and hospitality industry, and I look forward to the next gathering!’’