Category: conferences

Events Management Higher Education: Current issues in the U.K.

I recently gave a keynote presentation at the 2nd International Planning and Creativity Competition, in Hangzhou, China.

In my presentation, I highlighted three issues affecting the development of higher education for events in the UK:

  • Articulating the value of a degree in events management, as opposed to ‘just’ having industry experience or completing work-based training.
  • How to effectively teach about creativity and technology, when most events degrees are taught in business schools.
  • The questions of whether we we helping to develop and enhance the ‘profession’ of events management, or just creating individual professionals.

This event brings together academics, industry figures and students from across China for presentations, workshops and and an event planning competition for undergraduate students. Last year, I was able to speak at the event in person, and a group of our students from the University of Greenwich took part in the competition. Hopefully, we will be back next year. You can view my presentation below:

Island Tourism Symposium

The Tourism Research Centre at the University of Greenwich, in partnership with the Observatory on Tourism for Island Economies (OTIE), is holding an afternoon symposium on island tourism, which will be held at our World Heritage Site campus in London on Friday 28th February 2020, 2pm-6pm.

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This event will be of interest to island tourism researchers, including postgraduate students, and will be an opportunity to network, discuss new research in island tourism, and learn more about the work of OTIE, Europe’s leading association for the study of tourism in island economies. This is a free event and the programme will include:

A Social Network Analysis of Island Tourism Enterprises: San Vito Lo Capo, Sicily

Prof. Giovanni Ruggieri, Researcher in Tourism Economics, University of Palermo, Italy

Tour of the Pacific Encounters Gallery: https://www.rmg.co.uk/see-do/we-recommend/attractions/pacific-encounters

Dr Aaron Jaffer, Curator of World History and Cultures, National Maritime Museum

Tourism and Hospitality Entrepreneurship in Islands

Paul Booth, Tourism Research Centre, Department of Marketing, Events and Tourism, University of Greenwich

Panel Discussion on Contemporary Issues affecting Island Tourism Destinations

Chaired by Dr Samantha Chaperon, Tourism Research Centre, Department of Marketing, Events and Tourism, University of Greenwich

Places at this event are free, but limited.  Please register you place here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/island-tourism-symposium-tickets-90634535335

If you have any questions about the event, please contact Dr Samantha Chaperon s.a.chaperon@greenwich.ac.uk

UK : China collaboration in the events industry

I recently gave the keynote presentation below as keynote for the Zhejiang Global Exhibtion Forum in Hangzhou, China. You can view the presentation, below. In it, I emphasised three areas of potential collaboration: the fusion of creative and tech; incentive travel; city-city partnerships for event destinations.

James Kennell presenting

Interpreting History Conference

On 19th September, I’ll be speaking at the Interpreting History conference at Alexandra Palace in London.  This looks set to be an excellent event, with a focus on how to interpret historical sites and stories for visitors and tourists.  I’ll be talking about dark tourism, and ways in which destinations can interpret their dark histories to attract this market.  You can view the whole programme and book here.

Alexandra Palace
Alexandra Palace- the conference venue

Curated by the England’s Historic Cities consortium, the host of this one day conference will be Dr Jonathan Foyle, architectural historian and self-confessed “historic buildings obsessive” whose TV appearances uncover those stories that makes history relevant to today’s audiences. Jonathan will be joined by a raft of UK and international speakers from leading visitor attractions, tourist boards, heritage bodies, and companies which are currently leading the agenda in digital and interpretation innovation.

Alongside the conference, there will be an exhibition to allow participants to see demonstrations of or to experience for themselves new interpretive technologies and to discuss in depth with their developers.  And there will also be an opportunity for everyone to experience the £27m renovation of the Theatre and East Court at Alexandra Palace, this wonderful Victorian landmark.

ROOTS Project Launch Event

Next month, I’ll be speaking at the launch event in Ireland of the ROOTS project, an EU-funded project that has the aim of supporting small businesses across Europe to take advantage of cultural tourism opportunities.

roots project

Along with partners in Ireland, Romania, the U.K., Denmark and the Netherlands, we’ve been working together over the last eighteen months to develop this project, with ERASMUS+ funding, which will soon provide a series of free online manuals and training kits that will be rolled out to train small business owners and managers.

At the launch event, which is free to attend, I’ll be speaking about how small destinations can use events to promote themselves and to encourage tourism, using examples from cultural heritage destinations across Europe.

CHME 2019 – Transforming Hospitality

 

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CHME 2019 – Transforming Hospitality

21 May – 24 May 2019

University of Greenwich, London

Register now at www.gre.ac.uk/CHME19

The University of Greenwich are delighted to be hosting the 28th annual conference of the Council for Hospitality Management and Education – ‘Transforming Hospitality’ which has a focus on how hospitality enables us to understand the complex social and cultural structures and practices within which it operates. New multidisciplinary enquiries are redefining what hospitality is with a view to contributing to what hospitality is becoming – a tool that allows us to critically appraise the changes that are taking place in the world around us.

This conference aims to showcase insightful and influential research and help to set future research agendas within critical hospitality studies, hospitality management, health, and urban hospitality. To share the best practice in scholarship and pedagogy, this conference will also provide opportunities for those academics and industry professionals wishing to contribute to enhancing the value of pedagogic research.

Full details of the conference, including the call for papers, can be found at: www.gre.ac.uk/CHME19

Conference Tracks
Track 1: Hospitality Management
Track 2: Critical and Cultural Studies of Hospitality
Track 3: Learning, Teaching and Assessment in Hospitality Management Education
Track 4: Urban Hospitality
Track 5: Hospitality and Wellness

Attendance Fees:
Early Bird Fee: £440 Non-members, £340 Members, £210 Student

Full Conference Fee: £480 Non-members, £380 Members, £250 Student

One Day Fee: £200

Gala Dinner for your guests: £110

 

Register now at www.gre.ac.uk/CHME19

Cultur WB

Last week, I was very pleased to be invited to speak at the launch of the Cultur WB network, in Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina. Cultur WB is a new network to support the development of Cultural Tourism across the Western Balkans region that has been set up with ERASMUS+ funding in a project with partners from Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro, The Netherlands, Austria and Germany.  When I was there the project was also bringing in new contributions from the UK, Greece and Albania.

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The Cultur WB partners in Sarajevo

The Cultur WB project aims to not only strengthen ties between people working on cultural tourism as practitioners and researchers in the region, but also to to develop life-long-learning programmes for people working in tourism and new Masters programmes in cultural tourism.  At the launch event, I gave a presentation on how small and emerging destinations can use cultural events to develop their tourism, and how we should think about measuring the impacts of these events.  You can view the presentation below:

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The launch event was fantastic, with presentations from politicians, academics and practitioners.  Sarajevo itself is an amazing city and the organisers of the event, Sarajevo Meeting of Cultures, are doing an incredible job of trying to get their city onto the Cultural Tourism map, which I have no doubt they are succeeding in.

ITSA London Office

We have just launched the new London Office for the International Tourism Studies Association (ITSA) at the University of Greenwich.

Kennell

I chaired the event in my new role as Executive Director of the London Office and attendees were welcomed to the University by Professor David Maguire, our Vice Chancellor.

There were also two excellent presentations by Professor Xinran Lehto from Purdue University, the incoming President of ITSA, and Professor Wolfgang Georg Arlt, ITSA’s Vice President for Western Europe and the Director of the China Outbound Tourism Research Institute.

ITSA launch photo
A group photo from the event, to celebrate the launch

Attendees included visiting academics and researchers, journalists and industry representatives, as well as members of the Tourism Research Centre, which is hosting the new office.

ITSA is a leading international network of tourism researchers, with offices in China, the USA and now the UK.  If you’d like any more information about ITSA, have a look at the ITSA website or get in touch!

Big Events in Small Destinations

I recently spoke at the 2nd annual International Conference for Students in Tourism and Gastronomy, in Skopje, Macedonia.  My presentation was about how small tourism destinations, especially in emerging economies, can use major events as part of their tourism branding.  You can view my presentation below:

To get an idea of what my presentation was about, have a look at this short video about the recent stage of the World Triathlon Championship that was held in Jersey, a small island of 100,000 people off the coast of France.  With a worldwide television audience of 3 million people, hosting this event provided media exposure that Jersey Tourism could never afford.

This was a great event, which I also spoke at last year.  This year was even more successful, with presentations from Ljupco Janevski  from the Macedonian National Tourism Agency, Thiago Ferreria from Serbia4Youth and Prof. Dejan Metodijeski from the Goce Delcev University of Stip.  I’m looking forward to supporting the event again next year as it continues to grow and become an important tourism event in the region.

Travel Constraints for City Break Travel: Novi Sad, Serbia

I was recently very pleased to be invited onto the Scientific Committee for the 17th Contemporary Trends in Tourism and Hospitality conference in Novi Sad, Serbia.  With colleagues from the University of Novi Sad, we presented a paper on the constraints affecting city break tourists, based on research by my colleague Dr Miroslav Vujičić into visitors to the city of Novi Sad itself.  This is useful research for researchers and practitioners considering city marketing and urban destination management as it identifies the factors that impact on potential tourists’ decision to travel.  The abstract for this paper is below:

 

TRAVEL CONSTRAINTS FOR CITY BREAK TRAVEL – CASE STUDY: NOVI SAD, VOJVODINA, SERBIA

 

Miroslav D. Vujičić (1)*, James Kennell (2), Tamara Jovanović (1), Đorđije A. Vasiljević (1), Snežana Besermenji (1), Uglješa Stankov (1), Igor Stamenković (1)

(1) Department of geography, tourism and hotel management, Faculty of Sciences, University of Novi Sad, Trg Dositeja Obradovića 3, 21000 Novi Sad, Serbia

(2) Department of Marketing, Events and Tourism, Faculty of Business, University of Greenwich, Old Royal Naval College, Park Row, Greenwich, London SE10 9LS

* Corresponding author: miroslav.vujicic@dgt.uns.ac.rs

 

Travel constraints in general can be described as barriers or blockages that inhibit continued use of recreation service, but maybe a better definition was given by Jackson (1991) which described them as factors that “limit the formation of leisure preferences and … inhibit or prohibit participation and enjoyment in leisure”.  Most researchers distinguish three categories of constraints: interpersonal (attributes of the individual) intrapersonal (social interaction) and structural (characteristics of the physical environment).

 

In recent times cities emerged as principal centres of human activity and can be perceived as places that facilitate a diverse range of social, cultural and economic activities and where tourism and entertainment form major service components. Novi Sad is the second largest city of Serbia, the capital of the autonomous province of Vojvodina and the administrative centre of the South Bačka District. This research deals with limitations for city break travel, for tourists who visit Novi Sad. The authors used the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) method with the aim to rank constraints in city break travel. Preliminary results indicate that structural constrains (0.633) are most dominant, followed by intrapersonal (0.199) and that the least dominant are interpersonal constrains (0.169).  The synthesis of results, 22 items in total, indicate that the most dominant constraints are:

 

  • Travel is too expensive (0.078)
  • Business obligations limit my travel (0.072)
  • Travel involves too much risk (0.060)

 

and the least dominant are:

 

  • I don’t have time to travel (0.017)
  • Too much traffic on destination (0.022)
  • I don’t have enough information about a place I plan to visit (0.029)

 

This research showed that most dominant constraint factors are structural in nature,  as shown by criteria weights on first level of hierarchy and the synergy of the results of criteria weights which acknowledge that fact. The study showed that the consistency ratio (CR), according to the AHP method, is 0.07 (CR<0.1), indicating that the study is reliable and accurate and that therefore there is no need for adjustments in the comparison between criteria.

 

Key words: Travel constraints, city break, Novi Sad, analytical hierarchy process