President's Message

It has been a busy few months for the Academy executive.

The new website is up and running. If you have not seen it yet, please go to: www.tourismscholars.org. The new site is much more streamlined and much more user friendly. In particular, the "Information" and "Teaching and Learning" links have been developed so that fellows can upload relevant links to open access resources for the benefit of the broader academic community. Please let Leslie know if you have anything you would like to add.

As with all new/updated websites, there are still some glitches in the system. Please take time to look thoroughly the site and let Leslie know if anything needs to be fixed. We are currently updating photos and contact lists.

The conference is shaping up to be an excellent event. The agenda is almost finalised and the hotel is ready for us. We received a total of nine nominations for Visiting Scholars and another nine for Emerging Scholars. We have space for eight Visiting Scholars (and I am sure we can accommodate all nine if they are suitable), plus three Emerging Scholars.

Exciting news. Fellows will be invited to be videoed to talk about their careers and their most significant contributions to tourism. The idea is to develop a series of short videos of Fellows that can be accessed from the Academy website, as well as uploaded on YouTube. It will be a valuable teaching tool for academics from around the world who can let fellows who have defined how and what we think about tourism talk about their works in their own words.  Staff from Sun Yat Sen University have agreed to do the video recording, while Elsevier has agreed to sponsor the costs of editing the raw video into finished products.

Enjoy the rest of the semester and holiday season.

Best wishes,

Bob
bob.mckercher@polyu.edu.hk