Furthering TourMIS at ERSA Barcelona

As part of a busy end to 2014, MU President Karl Wöber was invited to be the Keynote Speaker at the 2014 Barcelona Workshop on Regional and Urban Economics at the University of Barcelona. Organized by the AQR research group, the Workshop is a high level research meeting of leading economists and other scholars interested in the analysis of urban development.

Over the two day workshop in late November, both senior and young upcoming researchers presented cutting-edge research papers focusing on cultural tourism and sustainable urban development.

Following the workshop’s opening by Jordi Suriñach, Chair of the Scientific Committee of University of Barcelona. Prof. Wöber summarized how the MU-developed and supported TourMIS (Tourism Marketing Information System) is an invaluable tool for the analysis of cultural tourism and sustainable development.

“The Barcelona Workshop on Regional and Urban Economics was an exciting event where I had the opportunity to present our work on tourism indicators and the tools we developed for supporting city tourism planners and marketers. It was a great honor being invited as a keynote speaker,” said Prof. Wöber.

Other first-day highlights of the Workshop included a research project focused on the role of the UNESCO inscription in tourism destinations performance and the evidence from the Italian regions, cultural resources as a factor in cultural tourism attractiveness and the performance analysis of regional destinations in Spain, and a comparison of the centralized and the decentralized tourism policies based on a Spatial Interaction Model Framework.

The second session focused on tourism incidence on cultural activities with papers such as “How often to a museum? Motivations matter”, “Persuasive communication of authenticity and sustainability in cultural tourism”, and a paper on the impact of tourism flows on demand for large regional and city theatres in Austria.

The final session focused on the impact of cultural tourism, with presenters discussing the measured impact of tourism on the economy through regional input-output modeling, as well as analyzing the development of cultural tourism and wellbeing of urban residents.

Building on the success of the 2014 AQR Barcelona Workshop on Regional and Urban Economics, a special issue of the leading journal ‘Tourism Economics’ will be published on the topic of Cultural Tourism and Sustainable Urban Development, and edited by Prof. Wöber  and Jordi Suriñach (University of Barcelona).

Other collaborations are on the horizon according to Dr. Wober, “The University of Barcelona is one of the leading universities in Spain and the Faculty of Economics and Business is particularly renowned for their excellence in research and teaching. I took the opportunity to start a discussion process which hopefully will lead to another study abroad opportunity for MU students. The university is not only a great place for learning but also nicely located in the center of Barcelona, very close to the well-know stadium Camp Nou, the home ground of FC Barcelona.”