Members' Activities for March 2008 Issue

David L. Edgell, Sr.
David will present a research paper on “Climate Change and Tourism: The Case for the Coastline of the Outer Banks, North Carolina” later this year at The Coastal Society’s 21st Biennial Conference. While this paper is based on research on the Outer Banks, it also contains general information on “climate change and tourism”.

Eduardo Fayos-Sola
Eduardo’s email address has been changed to europa@unwto.org with immediately effect.

David Harrison
David has moved from his position as Professor Tourism, Culture and Development at London Metropolitan University to be Professor and Head of Department of Tourism and Hospitality at the University of the South Pacific, with effect from the end of February.

Don Hawkins
IFC, a member of the World Bank Group, has joined forces with African business schools to support the development of high-quality education for managing tourism in the region by developing a Tourism Training Network. The Tourism Training Network draws on the expertise of leading faculty from the George Washington University in the United States, the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and other world-class tourism programs. It will help increase the capacity of African business schools in designing and delivering executive education programs that target private sector and public sector managers.

Don, Eisenhower Professor of Tourism Policy at the George Washington University School of Business is serving as faculty advisor to the network. Delivering quality management education in tourism is vital to unlocking its potential as a strategic growth sector in Africa.

As part of the first phase of the program, faculty from five African business schools in Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, Rwanda, and Senegal recently completed an intensive course development session at the University of Pretoria, under the guidance of Don and Professor Ernie Heath (University of Pretoria). The participating schools committed to launch executive education programs in tourism by July 2008. They include the School of Finance and Banking (Rwanda), Strathmore University (Kenya), Institut Superieur de Management (Senegal), Instituto Superior Politecnico e Universitario (Mozambique), and Institut National des Sciences Comptables et de l'Adminstration d'Entreprises (Madagascar).

Don is also serving as an advisor to the newly formed Centre of Excellence for Destinations (CED) initiated in Canada. The mission of CED is to help tourist destinations worldwide reach excellence by: (a) increasing their competitiveness; b) contributing to sustainable development goals; (c) improving service quality; and (d) enhancing the geographical character of a place—its environment, culture, aesthetics, heritage, and the well-being of its residents. In fulfilment of this mission, the CED will expand upon the activities of the Destination Council of the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) by bringing added value and expertise on innovative destination policies and practices. The CED will catalyse collaborative activities and partnerships with public and private stakeholders such as destination management organisations, tourism industry experts and associations, university centres, and civil society at large.

Dennison Nash
As part of the fall-out of his recently published book, Dennison gave a talk on Tourism and History to the local historical society (Mansfield, Ct.). On Nov. 20, he has been a guest on a local radio program discussing the possibilities of developing Willimantic, Ct. into a tourism destination (Many think that the town is a dump, but there are those (possibly influenced by Urry's comment concerning Glasgow) who think that it can be turned into an interesting destination), He also will be talking about his book to an audience from the Museum of Natural History and to a group from the Division of Humanities. Finally, he is gearing up to teach a small Honors course on Ethnography in the spring semester.

Chris Ryan
Chris was able to join with other Academy members including Peter Murphy, Kathy Hsu, Kaye Chon, Stephen Witt, Haiyan Song and Julio Arramberri at the 4th China Tourism Forum in Kunming where members played various roles being key note speakers, plenary session chairs, presenters of papers and session chairs, and in Kaye's case - conference organiser. Chris gave a paper co-authored with Professor Gu Humin on tourism impacts in Hungcun. Earlier in the year he had been in the UK where he ran doctoral student workshops at the University of Wales Institute Cardiff, and had given presentations at the Universities of Central Lancashire and Surrey. He then travelled to Taiwan where he met Professor Janet Chang at Chinese Cultural University, gave a presentation there, and also another at National Kaohshiung Hospitality College, where he was able meet old friends including Professor 'T C' Huang. He was also able to attend the weeding of one of his former doctoral students, Dr Melissa Tsai, who has now been lecturing at Kaoshiung for several years. The same wedding gave him an opportunity to catch up with another formal doctoral student, Dr Steve Pan, who now lectures at Taichung University. In addition he was able to later again partner Peter Murphy as a member of a review panel at James Cook University, Queensland. Currently Chris is in Dubai, where he is working with Dr Heba Aziz who is the Director for Research Services for the Jumeirah Hotel Group. At the same time he is trying to complete another project commenced with Professor Gu Huimin, which is an edited book on Chinese Destination Management. Both of them have also completed 3 other works to be published later in 2008 in conjunction with various colleagues from both Beijing International Studies University and the University of Waikato - these being on international hotel case studies (in both Mandarin and English), a book on research methods (in Mandarin) and a book on crisis management (in English). They have also commenced work, with Professor Kaye Chon, on issues of visitor tolerance of pollution with reference to polluted lakes in China. In February Chris will then return to the University of Waikato where Academy members Professors David Airey and Peter Murphy, will be heading an enquiry into tourism courses and structures at that university.

Valene Smith
The Society for Applied Anthropology decided prior to their 2007 Annual Meeting to institute a Valene Smith Award to recognize outstanding student research in tourism. Given positive student input, the award was created to support Student Poster entries, demonstrated in terms of clarity, organization, content and methodology. At the 2007 conference there were 18 submissions; the first prize was $500. And two honorable mentions were awarded in the amount of $250 each. SfAA hopes that the existence of the award will stimulate corporate donors from the travel industry, and encourage additional student participation.

Valene reminds colleagues that ANNALS OF TOURISM RESEARCH published a Special Issue on Antarctic Tourism (21:2 1994) but the publicity generated by the motion pictures March of the Penguins and Happy Feet has led to a veritable explosion in the number of Antarctic visitors and vessels to transport them. In previous years, ship captains were able to negotiate their itineraries so that one never saw another vessel. In our November 2007 visit to the Antarctic Peninsula, at three different view spots, our 104 passenger adventure ship had to wait while three large cruise vessels departed before we could not make zodiac landings. The sinking of the aged Explorer highlights another problem: trying to meet public demand for low-cost Antarctic tourism, the ship did not have satellite communication and current ice charts that would have warned of the danger. Similarly, the old open life boats were a major hazard in the prevailing storm of 30-40 ft waves and 40-50-mph winds. Tragedy was averted thanks to the fast and capable reaction of the nearby Nordnorge, and the sudden lessening of the storm. This experience, however, will undoubtedly lead to re-assessment of Antarctic tourism.

Geoffrey Wall
The Chinese translation of Tourism: Change, Impacts and Opportunities by Geoffrey and Alister Mathieson was recently published by Higher Education Press in Beijing.

Allan Williams
Allan, together with Michael Hall (University of Canterbury), have written a book on 'Tourism and Innovation', which will be published by Routledge in March 2008. The chapters in the book are:

Allan also co-authored a report on 'Rural Tourism Innovation', published by the UK's National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts in December 2007.

Arch Woodside
Tourism Management edited by Arch (Boston College) and Drew Martin (UH-Hilo) provides in-depth coverage of core topics in the five major activities in the field: sense making, planning, implementing, evaluating, and administrating destination and hospitality management programs. Scholars working from Asia, Europe, North American, and Australia - New Zeeland perspectives provide original chapter contributions in Tourism Management. Ten chapters include experiential executive training exercises with solutions. Tourism Management is useful for executive training and capstone college/university undergraduate and graduate courses in destination and hospitality management. CABI is the publisher of Tourism Management (2008).

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