Summit in Athens - Profs. Wöber and Smeral present at the Tourist Research Center annual meeting
The 48th annual meeting of the Tourist Research Center (TRC) was held from March 21st-24th at the the University of the Aegean in Athens, Greece. The TRC is an organization of tourism scholars from across Europe, who meet yearly to exchange experience of research in tourism.
Aiming to keep the group to a small number of scholars with a dedicated interest in tourism, the TRC allows a maximum of 25 members with not more than three per country. Two of the Austrian representatives in this association call MODUL University their home institution, President Karl Wöber and Professor Egon Smeral. Both were present at the summit to present their latest work on tourism research.
Profs. Wöber and Smeral were two of the seven scholars who presented work to the gathered academics. Prof. Wöber presented ‘Destination Benchmarking in Tourmis – Status Quo and Outlook’ to the gathered scholars. The web platform, developed by Wöber and other MU faculty, is an information and decision support system for tourism SMEs/ Managers, consultants, media and students. It provides data and automatic tools which allow tourism managers to apply and understand scientific concepts, methods, and models.
Prof. Smeral spoke on ‘Forecasting City Tourism: The Case of Vienna’. He discussed the importance of rapidly growing city tourism as an economic factor and the need for reliable forecasting models to get useful information on demand growth, future room capacity requirements and the price situation to be expected. He has helped fill the gap in city tourism research by developing an econometric model of the hotel bed supply and the demand for overnight stays on a monthly basis for Vienna.
Abstracts from theirs and the other papers given are available at the Tourist Research Center’s website.
