Soultana Symeonidou
Soultana got her BSc in Tourism Management from the Technological and Educational Institute of Crete, Greece in 2007. While she was studying she had a variety of employment experiences in the Tourism sector including the position of Sales and Reservations Assistant Manager for a local Travel Agent with specialisation in the Russian Market. After the completion of her undergraduate studies she decided to move back to her home town to explore new career opportunities.
In the beginning of 2008 she was employed by an international IT company as a Project Manager and then as Managing Director in order to create and operate the greek subsidiary company. The same year her undergraduate dissertation was presented in a conference and her first paper was published. Realising that her interests laid more in the research side and particularly in the Tourism and Technology field, she moved to the UK in 2010 and obtained her MSc in Tourism Management and Marketing at Bournemouth University.
In parallel with her postgraduate studies, her knowledge on technical and technology matters were appreciated by Professor Dimitrios Buhalis and he appointed her as a Website Administrator and Developer for the International Federation for IT and Travel & Tourism.
Shortly after the completion of her MSc thesis in 2011, she started her employment in Bournemouth University as a researcher on eTourism and currently she is working on the FP7 – The DIG project (Digital Interactive Graffiti) along with Professor Dimitrios Buhalis. Soultana is very interested on all aspects of Tourism and Technology and describes herself as a “tourism and technology geek”.