MU’s Tourism and Service Management Team presents at ENTER2014 Conference

Dr. Irem Önder (Assistant Professor), Ms. Lidija Lalicic (Researcher and Lecturer) and Mr. Daniel Leung (Researcher and Lecturer) from MU’s Department of Tourism and Service Management recently attended and presented their latest scholarly works at the 21st annual ENTER conference (ENTER2014) in Dublin, Ireland, on January 21-24 2014.

Hosted by the International Federation for Information Technologies in Travel and Tourism (IFITT), the ENTER conference is widely recognized as the largest worldwide and unique forum for exchanging state-of-the-art knowledge on the application of information and communication technologies to travel and tourism. Featuring the theme of “Where Social Inspiration meets Dynamic eTourism Innovation”, the 4-day programme comprised Research Track, Destinations Track, Industry Track and PhD Workshop, which provided delegates with the opportunity to explore eTourism opportunities and challenges within the social inspiration context from both theoretical and practical perspectives.

On the first day of the conference, Lidija presented her doctoral research proposal in the PhD workshop. Employing the structural equation modelling decision-tree approach, her proposed idea of extracting value dimensions and behavioural intentions from consumer-generated online dialogue was well received by the international audience. In addition to presenting her research proposal, Lidija presented the collaborative work with MU’s Associate Professor Dr. Astrid Dickinger titled “How emotional do we get? A closer look into the TripAdvisor dialogue” at the main conference.

Dr. Önder presented her study “Destination benchmarking with Geotagged photographs”, which was written in collaboration with Dr. Wolfgang Körbitz from Vienna University of Economics. Both presenters received positive on these findings as well as on the approach of identifying benchmarking partners of Austrian regions using photos on Flickr.com also covered by Dr. Önder.

Daniel presented two joint works with academics from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University titled “Assessing the visibility of hotels on smartphones: A case study of hotels in Hong Kong” as well as “Sharing internship experience on the Internet: A study of tourism and hotel management college students” at the conference. Considering the exploratory nature of the studies, the audience provided Daniel with potential directions for future research.

Aside from presenting their work at the conference, the MU team made use of the opportunity to network with academics and practitioners from 15 nationalities in the social sessions. As the eTourism community expands globally, the success of ENTER2014 is expected to grow even more in the lead up to ENTER2015 at Lugano, Switzerland. To learn more about ENTER2014, please visit the official website.