Yesterday Joanne presented our paper “Tourist experiences at overcrowded attractions: A text analytics approch” at ENTER 2021 and already today we can be happy about the 2nd place at the Best Full Paper Award. It fills me with pride when I see what kind of achievements you can bring your students to, especially when you consider that master students can prevail against old-established professors.
At the international ENTER conference, the world’s largest eTourism conference, which took place this year in Guildford at the University of Surrey in the UK, our Masterprogram achieved great success, as we were awarded second place in the Best Paper Award for their paper entitled “Exploring the Impact of Multisensory VR on Travel Recommendation: A Presence Perspective”.
left to right: Roman Egger, Jasmin Hopf, Melina Scholl, Barbara Neuhofer
Roman Egger and Barbara Neuhofer had submitted a paper from the Research Seminar together with Master students. “With a rejection rate of 60%, ENTER is considered very selective. The fact that we were then nominated and even achieved second place makes us all the happier”, reports Roman Egger, head of the eTourism department and head of the Key Competencies & Research Methods. “In addition, you have to bear in mind that there were no other Master’s students presenting at the conference, so the competition was definitely very strong,” he adds.
The innovative study brings together the topics of eTourism and experience design. “We have researched how VR can be enriched with all senses in the future, resulting in an immersive experience for the participants”, says Barbara Neuhofer
Over the course of several semesters, the Master’s students work on a research project and the publication, which can then be submitted to a conference. This is a good opportunity to get students interested in research. The successful supervision of the scientific work is confirmed by this. Already in 2019 students could present their paper at the ENTER conference in Cyprus.
The participation gives students an insight into the academic world and has already inspired some of our students to continue with PhD studies.
The Rectorate and International Office of the FH Salzburg supported the students financially, so that they could present their publication on site. The next ENTER Conference will take place in China in 2021.
More information: https://enter2020.ifitt.org/
This year’s International Student Conference on Tourism Research (ISCONTOUR), organized jointly by FH-Krems and MCI Innsbruck, attracted about 300 participants from over 30 nations to Innsbruck to present their accepted papers.
Master’s students of the program Innovation and Management in Tourism (IMT) were also represented. The articles from the research seminar series “eTourism Research” (Prof. Roman Egger and Prof. Barbara Neuhofer) were submitted and all six papers were assessed in a tripple-blind-review procedure, despite a 50% rejection rate. Thus, the entire 4th semester of the Master students was on site to present their results at the ISCONTOUR.
The culmination of the event was the Best-Paper Award. Two groups won first and second place in the Best ICT Paper Award at the international competition. Victory was won by the study group Augmented Reality. They developed an AR prototype for the Salzburg Zoo to provide information about animals living in the zoo and tested the acceptance of such a solution. Second place went to the Virtual Reality group. In an experiment and with the help of biofeedback (heart rate, skin conduction ), they examined how 4D Virtual Reality (as additional stimuli, smells, wind, heat, etc.) differed from classic virtual reality in a holiday scenario with respect to the construct “presence”.
Julia Beck, a Master Student of our Programme Innovation and Management in Tourism recently won two awards for her thesis “Virtual Reality as a Tool to Trigger Emotions in Tourism Marketing – Subjective and Objective Measurements to Investigate the Impact of Virtual Reality” (You can read our blog artice about that topic here). Julia got second at the Austrian National Tourism Research Award “Tourissimus” and won the Best ICT-Paper Award at the ISCONTOUR 2017. Congratulations – well done!
Prof. Roman Egger was recently awarded for the “Fellow of the ICE Award”. He received this honoured award at the annual meeting of the ICE in Lucern for „Outstanding academic contribution to Tourism, Hospitality, Education, Training & Research“. Thank you very much for this award!
Just announced: The book “eTourism: Systeme und Prozesse” Roman Egger published together with Göcke, Schulz and Weithöner is the winner of the ITB Book-Award 2016!
The Jury said: “Das umfangreiche Buch ist zum Grundlagenwerk für das Management der Informationstechnologie im Tourismus geworden. Die maßgebende Systematik und die praxisnahe Darstellung des Informationsmanagements und der IT-Systeme machen es zu einem der wichtigsten Handbücher für die Tourismuswirtschaft. ”
Our new book “Gamification in Tourism: Designing Memorable Experiences” by Paul Bulencea and Roman Egger made it to the Bestseller-List – No1 in Marketing Research! – Amazing!
