Welcome to Professor Metin Kozak‎, Dokuz Eylul University, Turkey to the Department of Tourism and Hospitality, Bournemouth University. He will spend two months with us working with Professor Dimitrios Buhalis on a research project funded by the Turkish government The Establishment of Joint Cross-border Destination Marketing. The study objectives include 1) the identification of potential instruments/organisations taking place in a cross-border collaborative destination marketing between Greece and Turkey; 2) suggesting solutions for any possible barriers that may hinder a successful implementation of cross-border collaborative destination marketing; and 3) the discussion of possible benefits/advantages for both parts in order to be successful for marketing in international tourism.

Metin is a specialist in quality management, benchmarking, destination management and marketing, consumer behaviour, competitiveness, and branding. He holds a Bachelor’s degree from Cukurova University (Turkey), Master’s from Dokuz Eylul University (Turkey) and Ph.D. from Sheffield Hallam University (UK); all relating to tourism and hospitality management. He has published a wider range of articles in top-tier journals such as (i.e. Annals, TM, JTR, IJHM, Cornell Quarterly, JTTM), conference papers in more than 40 countries and books released by Elsevier, Routledge, CABI, Emerald, Cambridge Scholars Publishing among others. He is the co-editor of Anatolia and serves an editorial board member of over 25 journals including Annals, JTR, JTTM, JBR and TA. In addition, he was a Research Fellow in 2005-2006 at the University of Namur (Belgium) and as Visiting Professor at Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Hong Kong SAR).

He is involved in several tourism-based national and international research projects, particularly with his partners based in Europe and the US. Developing such partnerships has resulted in publishing quality journal papers, conference presentations and book chapters. As of September 2015, his works have received over 300 citations in ISI-referenced journals and over 6,000 citations counted by Google Scholar. Recently, he was ranked among the top 25 prolific tourism researchers in terms of the number of publications from 1985 to 2004 (Zhao & Ricthie, 2007) and from 2000 to 2009 (Park, Phillips, Cantr & Abbott, 2011). He was also ranked among the top 50 prolific scholars in terms of the frequency of cited articles (McKercher, 2008). He was elected as the Fellow of the International Academy for the Study of Tourism (Hong Kong) and Tourist Research Centre (Austria).