ISCONTOUR 2022 - international student conference in tourism

After an informal kick-off, the conference started with four workshops on innovative methods in tourism research. They were followed by a keynote held by Kurt Matzler (University of Innsbruck) on "Race Across America - Leadership learnings from the world's toughest bike race". On the second day of the conference, James J. Kennelly (Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs/New York) held another keynote on "Authenticity, Sense of Place and the Development of Meaningful Tourism Experiences" and Raphaela Stadler (MCI Tourismus) on "Sustainable HRM Principles for the Events Industry: Tackling stress, burnout, and high staff turnover".

The students' paper presentations were submitted and presented in the research areas of destination management, sustainable tourism management, digital marketing, hospitality management, consumer behavior and digital transformation. In the session on "Tourism Marketing", for example, research work was presented on the topics of online theatre ticket purchasing, visual storytelling of destinations, artificial intelligence and voice assistance. In the track on "Tourism Product Development", 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. Here, the contributions covered the topics Destination Image of Singapore, Destination Development, as well as Co-opetition in destinations.

In the afternoon of the second conference day, the best papers were awarded: Owen Gohori & Peet van der Merwe from North-West University in South Africa won with the topic "Sustainable tourism as a vehicle for community development: A case of the CAMPFIRE programme in Zimbabwe". Second place went to Bianca Köstinger from IMC Krems. She presented her work "Employing Drawings to Research the Destination Image of Singapore". Third place went to Fabian Wettinger from FH Salzburg with his paper "Heteronormativity in the Advertising Imagery of the Touristic Mainstream in Bavaria".

Facts & figures on the ISCONTOUR

The annual International Student Conference in Tourism Research – ISCONTOUR - was founded in 2013 by IMC FH Krems and FH Salzburg to provide a platform for interesting theses. Since 2019, ISCONTOUR has been jointly organised by MCI and IMC Krems and held alternately at the two locations Krems and Innsbruck. At the ISCONTOUR, national and international students and graduates present their Bachelor's, Master's and PhD research projects. The two-day conference offered workshops on innovative research methods, exciting keynote lectures, social networking side-events and the presentations of the research papers accepted for ISCONTOUR.