TOURISM RESEARCH
You can find the latest topics of our research here.
What do we want?
The SME & Tourism team deals with issues of high relevance to Tyrol concerning small and medium-sized enterprises and family businesses, with a particular focus on tourism. We examine both the supply side (companies) aand the demand side (customers).
Our goal is to publish scientific articles in top journals while also providing practical solutions to problems in our regions.
"SME & Tourism" offers research-based support in this area. It is also important to us to provide scientifically sound and practical teaching. In this way, we want to bring students into the economy, but also bring the economy to our students!
Why is there a need for us?
Tourism companies are mostly small or even micro-enterprises that are subject to special characteristics. Over 92% of all companies in the tourism and leisure industry have an average of fewer than 10 employees, and over 72% of companies in the hotel industry.
Tourism companies are also mostly family businesses. The "family" system influences business decisions in all areas, meaning that business premises are not the only factors that apply. Strategic decisions, internal processes and even service provision itself follow a specific pattern, meaning that family-run tourism companies can actually enjoy competitive advantages. The most pressing discussion is currently about the structure of succession, with oter topics such as qualifications, career path development and family branding also being examined.
In addition, these tourism companies are always part of a tourism value chain. The value to be produced is therefore provided by a large number of companies, and it takes a great deal of effort to assess which services represents the core value for the customer at the end of their holiday. This makes it much more difficult to measure the innovation potential of individual companies, but it also shows how important it is to coordinate individual or joint product development processes.
Value creation is also increasingly taking place together with customers. "Customer co-creation", i. e. the participation of customers in the beneficial activities of a company, is one of the most important marketing and management research trends of recent years. This research focus offers added value for the tourism industry, as it (1) identifies the motivational factors for customers to engage in co-creation, (2) examines the extent to which the company can support customers in co-creation, and (3) evaluates the effects of co-creation on the financial and non-financial performance of a company. It is therefore important to show how tourism companies can increase their performance by utilising the skills of their customers while at the same time increasing the perceived benefits for the customer.
How do we approach this?
We have identified a number of core topics (e.g. Alpine leisure, digitalisation, sustainability) in applied tourism research that represent gaps in research on the one hand, but also play an important role in practice (in tourism and SMEs) on the other. In many of these longer-term research projects, we are supported by theses of doctoral and master's students.
You can find our research areas and current projects at https://tourismusforschung.online/
