Innovative Approaches to Tourism and Leisure

Vicky Katsoni is an Associate Professor in the Tourism Department of the Technological Educational Institute (TEI), Athens, Greece. She also teaches on the MSc program in Tourism Management at the Greek Open University and is academic supervisor of the e-Tourism Module at the National Kapodistrian University of Athens, Distant Learning Programs. She holds a PhD in Tourism Marketing Management and ICT Applications in Tourism, an MBA, a BA (Hons) in Economics, and a BSc in Tourism Management. She has published nine books on tourism in both Greek and English, as well as authoring chapters in edited volumes and numerous papers in highly academic journals. She is President of the nonprofit International Association of Cultural and Digital Tourism (IACuDiT.org) and an editorial board member for many journals in tourism and marketing. Her research interests include tourism marketing, cultural tourism, e-tourism, and tourism consumer behavior and she has participated in several European and national research projects.
Kathy Velander has nearly 30 years of experience in teaching, research, and consultancy and is involved in projects worldwide, advising communities on how, when, and where to develop ecotourism. Her emphasis is on capacity building, developing ecotourism experiences and products, and helping communities to address their training needs. Her work has spanned projects in Colombia, Honduras, Ecuador, Nepal, and Fiji. Within Europe she helped produce a development strategy for the Setomaa eco-villages project in Estonia and was consultant researcher on improving the competitiveness of community-based tourism in Estonia and Finland. Her work in the UK has included teaching sustainability concepts to local communities and researching various aspects of tourism events and initiatives. On this basis, she has developed a Tourism Resource Auditing Methodology (TRAM) to assist decision making on whether tourism is the best way forward in encouraging sustainable livelihoods. This process is now being used in the Scottish Scenic Routes initiative.