Sara Dolnicar

Prof. Dr., The University of Queensland

Speaker

Leveraging Technology to Make Hotel Operations More Environmentally Sustainable

Hotels represent a key part of the tourism industry. They also contribute substantially to the negative environmental impacts of the tourism industry. This presentation will discuss how technology can be used to provide valid measurements of the harm done by any given hotel, and – as such – serve as a benchmark for improvements as well as a basis for testing promising interventions aimed at reducing the environmental harm caused by hotel operations.

You can see PPT slide here.

Sara Dolnicar is a Professor of Tourism at The University of Queensland. She has a particular interest in empirical measurement in the social sciences, and has applied her work primarily to tourism, but has also contributed to the areas of environmental volunteering, foster care and public acceptance of water alternatives. Her current research program focuses on developing and experimentally testing measures that trigger pro-environmental behaviour in tourists. In recognition of her achievements, Professor Dolnicar was elected a Fellow of the Academy for the Social Sciences in Australia (ASSA), the International Academy for the Study of Tourism, the International Association of Scientific Experts in Tourism (AIEST), and the Council for Australasian Tourism and Hospitality Education (CAUTHE).

In 2019, she has been awarded a prestigious Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship to leave a creative and human legacy relating to her work into low harm hedonism. Professor Dolnicar currently serves as the Co-Editor in Chief of Annals of Tourism Research. She was awarded the Travel and Tourism Research Association (TTRA) Distinguished Researcher Award in 2017, and named the Slovenian Ambassador of Science in 2016, the highest honour the Republic of Slovenia bestows on expatriate Slovenian researchers in recognition of global excellence, impact, and knowledge transfer.