Donor
Seal of Love Charitable Foundation Limited
A pioneer Hong Kong hotelier, the late Mr Chan Chak-fu founded the 30-room Capital Hotel on Nathan Road in the 1950s and the most premium Ambassador Hotel in Hong Kong in the 1960s, which hosted American presidents and dignitaries. In early 1970s, he opened Park Lane Hotel, one of the oldest hotels on Hong Kong island. He then ventured abroad to build the lndra Hotel in Thailand. The 1980s saw the expansion of his hotel business on a global scale to include the second largest hotel in San Francisco with over 1,000 rooms, followed by the purchase of Churchill Hotel in London, eventually covering properties in the United States and Australia.
Ever mindful of local interests, the visionary Mr Chan invested on training talent on the home front to uphold the highest standards and sustainable development of hospitality excellence early on. In the 1980s, he donated HK$4 million to launch a hospitality vocational training programme supervised by the then Hong Kong Polytechnic. Not surprisingly, he was an early champion of the proposal to set up the University's School of Hotel and Tourism Management, which is now the world's best according to ShanghaiRanking's Global Ranking of Academic Subjects 2017.
Through this Endowed Professorship, the family of Mr and Mrs Chan Chak-fu is looking to realise the vision for grooming more local talent to further advance the international standard and image of local hotel business. This together with the synergy of cutting-edge management research and industry practices will constitute the key to sustaining Hong Kong's future success as a world leader in hospitality and tourism.
Appointee
Professor Haiyan Song
Professor Haiyan Song is Associate Dean and Chair Professor of the School of Hotel and Tourism Management (SHTM). His research focuses on tourism and hotel demand analysis, service recovery, tourist satisfaction, and wine economics. He has played significant roles in a number of international consultancy and collaborative projects, covering tourist satisfaction and service quality indices, Asia Pacific visitor forecasts, web-based tourism demand forecasting system, and development of the Guangdong tourist satellite account, which have considerable impact on tourist destination management.
Professor Song has published over 150 papers in top-tier journals in related fields, including Journal of Development Economics, Annals of Tourism Research, Tourism Management, Journal of Travel Research, and International Journal of Hospitality Management. Chief among his contributions to academic publishing are the leading roles he plays as Editor-in-Chief of Journal of China Tourism Research, Resource Editor of Annals of Tourism Research, and Deputy Executive Editor of Tourism Tribune. A frequent guest speaker on international conference circuit, Professor Song has shared his professional insights on issues ranging from tourism impact assessment, tourist satisfaction and service quality indices, tourism and hotel demand forecasting, to consumer behavioural studies.
Among his professional affiliations, he is President of both the International Association for Tourism Economics and International Association for China Tourism Studies and is a Fellow of the International Academy for the Study of Tourism. The honours he received include the John Wiley & Sons Lifetime Research Achievement Award by the International Council on Hotel, Restaurant and Institutional Education in 2010 and Michael D. Olsen Research Achievement Award by University of Delaware in 2014.
The Endowed Professorship will not only enable Professor Song and his research team to enhance their research to create positive impacts on tourism and hospitality practices but will also help further strengthen SHTM's world-leading position in tourism and hospitality education and research.
