MU wins Outstanding Paper Awards at BEST EN Think Tank XVIII
July 09, 2018
Representatives of the Department of Tourism and Service Management recently took part in the BEST EN Think Tank XVIII hosted by Lucerne University of Applied Sciences in Lucerne, Switzerland.
This year’s edition of the annual think tank was particularly notable for MU as our faculty won top honours. The paper by Researcher and Lecturer Hannes Antonschmidt and Professor Dagmar Lund-Durlacher titled “Can direct communication at the point of consumption reduce the attitude-behavior gap regarding food waste in hotels?” was distinguished with the prestigious Outstanding Paper Award, and thework of Researcher and Lecturer Kristof Tomej ("Socially Inclusive Holidays with Sighted Guiding: Motivations for Participation and their Marketing Implications") received the Outstanding Paper Award Runner-Up recognition.
After the event, BEST EN Chair Gianna Moscardo of James Cook University visited Modul University Vienna and personally awarded Dagmar, Hannes and Kristof for their excellent research.
These two awards are the latest among the many acknowledgments of MU’s research excellence that has been also reflected in its inclusion by U-Multirank in the list of world’s 25 top performing universities according to top-cited publications.
BEST EN Think Tanks (Building Excellence for Sustainable Tourism – an Education Network) are annual events that aim to push the field of sustainable tourism research and education forward. This year’s theme, Marketing Sustainable Tourism Products, was explored through numerous excellent presentations and posters from think tank participants, insightful keynote talks given by Dr. Martin Lohmann from Leuphana University Lüneburg (Germany) and Dr. Rachel Dodds from Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Hospitality and Tourism Management (Canada), as well as a field trip to UNESCO Biosphere Reserve Entlebuch, where issues of sustainable tourism development were discussed with local stakeholders.
The distinctive feature of BEST EN Think Tanks is the traditional workshop sessions, where participants from different institutions and parts of the world work collaboratively to produce new knowledge. This year, MU faculty joined in brainstorming and discussing issues related to aligning personal and sustainability benefits in tourism products as well as scaling up successful sustainable tourism initiatives.
As BEST EN is an open network and all of its resources are available free of charge to all students, academics, professionals and the public, the presentations and materials of the latest think tank, including the contributions of our colleagues, will be made available shortly at www.besteducationnetwork.org.
Photo: Dr. Dagmar Lund-Durlacher (left) and Kristof Tomej (right) receive the award certificates from BEST EN Chair Dr. Gianna Moscardo from James Cook University (middle)
