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The 9th edition of ISCOUNTOUR, the international student conference in tourism, took place at MCI in mid-May 2022.
In cooperation with MCI Tourism and IMC Krems, the 9th ISCONTOUR conference took place in Innsbruck on May 16 and 17, 2022. The international student conference offers students and graduates an international platform to present their research results.
After an informal kick-off excursion to the Hungerburg with the Nordkettenbahn, the conference started with four workshops on innovative methods in tourism research. In the first session, Philipp Wegerer (MCI Tourism) spoke on the topic of visual content analysis and Xavier Matteucci (Vienna University of Applied Sciences) on "Arts-based methods in tourism research". In the following session, students could choose between a workshop on ethnographic research by Claudia Dolezal (IMC Krems) and an introduction to eye-tracking by Katarina Volchek (Deggendorf Institute of Technology).
Kurt Matzler (University of Innsbruck) kicked off the keynotes on Monday evening with his presentation "Race Across America- Leadership learnings from the world's toughest bike race". With gripping images, he not only talked about his participation in the race, but in particular about the meticulous preparation and planning involved in such a project and what we can learn from it in terms of leadership and strategy.
In his keynote speech, James J. Kennelly from Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs (New York) gave an insight into the topic of "Authenticity, Sense of Place and the Development of Meaningful Tourism Experiences". These topics play a particularly important role in tourism. In her keynote speech, Raphaela Stadler (MCI Tourism) spoke about HR management in the event sector. In her presentation, she focused in particular on the topics of stress and burn-out in this sought-after field of work. Among other things, the participants learned that event managers are among the most stressful jobs of all, alongside air traffic controllers and reporters. She appealed for more long-term and sustainable HR management that focuses on the physical and mental health of employees.
The student paper tracks covered the research areas of destination management, digital marketing, digital transformation, consumer behavior, hospitality management and sustainable tourism management. In the session on "Tourism Marketing", for example, research papers were presented on the topics of online theater ticket purchasing, visual storytelling of destinations, artificial intelligence and voice assistance. In the "Tourism Product Development" track, papers on dark tourism, local products in the tourism value chain, Marin Widlife voluntourism and food allergy management were discussed. The session on "Destination Management" attracted a particularly large number of visitors. The contributions included the topics Destination Image of Singapore, Destination Development and Co-opetition in destinations.
The Best Paper award went to Owen Gohori & Peet van der Merwe from North-West University in South Africa with the topic "Sustainable tourism as a vehicle for community development: A case of the CAMPFIRE program in Zimbabwe". Second place went to Bianca Köstinger from IMC Krems. She presented her work "Employing Drawings to Research the Destination Image of Singapore". And third place went to Fabian Wettinger from the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences with his paper "Heteronormativity in the Advertising Imagery of the Touristic Mainstream in Bavaria".
You can find out more about the background to the event format in the TTR interview with Christian Maurer, the initiator of this event.