Our distinct focus is on tourism in cities and metropolitan areas. Our interests include airport management, business tourism, city image, conference and event tourism, national capital tourism, social tourism, sports tourism, tourism and city development, and tourism policy. Members of the Group frequently give papers at conferences and seminars, publish books, and write articles for scholarly and professional journals on these themes. In the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, research outputs in our unit of assessment were seen as achieving at least national excellence, with 70% of an internationally recognized quality, and some world leading. Recent research has included the image and regeneration legacies of sports and events strategies in the UK; the design of purpose-built conference centres; city tourism ‘off the beaten track’ in world tourism cities; the effectiveness of tourism management in historic cities; local tourism policy; tourism in national capitals; airport management and strategy; and the potential benefits of social tourism. Members of the Group chair the ATLAS international Research Groups on Business Tourism and on City and National Capitals Tourism.


We take a broad view of research and believe that the knowledge exchange that comes from working with and advising the tourism industry and government and from writing widely read books is important. Research has been commissioned by government and the private sector in the UK and internationally, with clients including VisitBritain, London Development Agency, National Audit Office, the Office for Science and Technology, the Brookings Institution, USA, Rafael del Pino Foundation, Spain, Tourism Flanders, ESRC, International Olympic Committee,  and national tourism organizations in the Netherlands and Poland. The essential contribution that research activity makes to our Undergraduate and Masters programmes was praised by the QAA in awarding us the highest possible score for the excellence of our programmes.

Full details of publications and research can be found on individual Staff Pages.

Networks

We work collaboratively with other universities in the UK and abroad, and with private sector consultancies and firms as well as with colleagues in the School. We work especially closely with our Visiting Research Fellows – academics from around the world who collaborate with us and broaden and deepen our expertise. We currently have Visiting Research Fellows from Australia, Belgium, Norway, Poland and the UK. We have other links with academics in many Universities around the world, including City University of New York; University of Technology Berlin; University of Applied Sciences, Bremen; the Berlin School of Economics; University of the Aegean, Greece; Dublin Institute of Technology; CERAM, Nice; University of Queensland; and University of Technology Sydney.