Melanie is a Senior Professor in
the Tourism Competence Centre (Corvinus
University Budapest). She is also Chair
of ATLAS (Association for Tourism and
Leisure Education) which has over 300
members in around 75 countries. She
co-ordinates more than ten Special
Interest Tourism Research Groups within
ATLAS.
She undertook extensive longitudinal research in the London Borough of Greenwich (UK) on the internal and external image of the local area from the perspective of residents and tourists (2000-2005) as part of a five year study of regeneration, cultural and tourism development. Methodologies included focus groups, surveys, interviews and exhibitions. As a result of this, she developed a Toolkit which can be used to measure the critical success factors for culture-led regeneration of tourism destinations. She was a Board Member of TourEast London (2002-2005), which focused on developing a destination brand image and tourism products for East London, as well as a member of Greenwich World Heritage Site Steering Group (2000-2005) which included tourism development, marketing and developing a brand image for the World Heritage Site. More recently she was involved in a research study on the image and branding of Hungary (2007-2010), especially its capital Budapest. This resulted in the development of a multi-level image model which was used by the Budapest Tourism Office to inform their branding strategy in 2009. Her special areas of interest are: health and wellness tourism, cultural and creative tourism, culture and regeneration. |