Making waves at Europe’s biggest e-Tourism conference

MU recently made waves at the 20th ENTER e-Tourism Conference held in Innsbruck, Austria between January 22th and 25th. It is the most important e-Tourism community event in Europe, organized by the International Federation for Information Technology and Travel and Tourism (IFITT).

The annual gathering brings together academia, industry, government and other stakeholders to exchange research and industrial case studies.

The theme of this year’s conference was eTourism opportunities and challenges for the next 20 years exploring information and communication technologies concepts, applications, and business models in travel and tourism.

MU’s Dr. Irem Önder and Karl Wöber were in attendance; Irem presented her research paper titled “Identifying Tourist Dispersion in Austria by Digital Footprints”, conducted in collaboration with Alexander C. Hubmann-Haidvogel of MU’s Department of New Media Technology and Wolfgang Koerbitz from Vienna University of Business and Economics.

Former Modulian Clemens Költringer won the Thesis Excellence Award for his doctoral thesis titled “Evaluating Destination Online Representation Measurement Leveraging Online Media for Market Research”, supervised by MU Associate Professor Astrid Dickinger and president Karl Wöber. This highest conference honour for PhD work is given for the most innovative and scientifically rigorous information technology and tourism-related thesis.

He was one of the original MU faculty members as MU opened its doors in 2007, and stayed with us until taking up a position as a Marketing Analyst for the Vienna Tourist Board after his thesis completion in 2012. His new appointment helps to act as a link between academia and industry, and he still remains involved with his former team of the Department of Tourism and Service Management at MU.

He is currently chairing the European Cities Marketing (ECM) editorial board working group jointly producing the annual benchmarking report with MODUL Research.

Clemens is no stranger to the awards podium at ENTER – he also won the best PhD Thesis Proposal award at the conference in 2009, and a paper produced in the course of his thesis (together with Astrid Dickinger and Wolfgang Koerbitz) was awarded the second place Best Paper Award in 2011.

Next year’s enter conference will be held in Dublin, Ireland - look for MU!

Clemens Költringer, third from left, at the Enter Conference awards ceremony. Photo: All rights reserved by IFITT.