Bringing you all the latest news from The Department of Tourism and Hospitality at Bournemouth University
Bournemouth University Tourism talent
Please see attached CVs of our graduating students from our BA (Hons) Tourism Management
https://microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk/tourism/files/2016/03/CVBScTourism.pdf
Adequate vegetable consumption is fundamental to a healthy balanced diet, however EU compliance with dietary guidelines is poor and there is a notable lack of research in this area. A collaborative team from Bournemouth University, led by nutrition expert Professor Heather Hartwell, are hoping to change our eating habits, championing vegetable consumption through a Europe-wide research project called VeggiEAT.
The VeggiEAT project aims to promote healthy eating throughout Europe and encourage more vegetable consumption across the lifespan. Professor Hartwell explains: “Within Europe, we don’t eat enough fruit and vegetables and there are a multitude of associated health issues. There’s been a lot of individual intervention, such as the five a day campaign, but VeggiEAT is particularly concerned with vegetable consumption by school children and older people.”
VeggiEAT aims to develop a European platform for vegetable intake that takes into account consumer behaviour and environment before making recommendations to both governments and vegetable manufacturers and suppliers. These recommendations will involve consumer-oriented products, the development of recipes for use by food providers and benchmarking of choice architecture facilitating the consumption of vegetables.
The project is already making an impact, and has seen engagement from both school children and older members of the community within Dorset. The project even involves current Bournemouth University undergraduate students who are testing dishes that have been designed by Culinary Master’s students in France.
Professor Hartwell, a registered nutritionist, actively works within the foodservice industry, and particularly within the public sector such as schools, hospitals and prisons, where she is able to translate her academic efforts into practice. She says: “It’s really important that the work done in universities is not isolated from how industry works – we can suggest solutions, but unless they are going to work in a real-life context, they are never going to be useful. That is one of the strengths of this research project – we are working to find reallife solutions that will help people to get the right nutrients in their diet from eating well and, ultimately, lead them to be healthier.”
Professor Hartwell and her team hope that VeggiEAT will cause us to make changes to our food habits. Professor Hartwell says: “We hope VeggiEAT will eventually inform government policy across Europe and put the food service industry at the forefront of healthy eating interventions – while also giving consumers foods they’ll enjoy. We want the change to start at an institutional level – through schools, canteens and restaurants – but ultimately we would like to see a change in consumer behaviour that makes vegetable consumption ‘the norm’ and promotes healthy food consumption across Europe.”
The project is made possible with the support of an interdisciplinary team that includes nutritionists, psychologists, consumer behaviour experts, public health experts and the food service industry. Bournemouth University is leading the project, working with the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and the University of Florence in Italy, alongside industry partners Bonduelle and the Institute Paul Bocuse in France.
Professor Hartwell believes that the interdisciplinary nature of the team is another element that gives the research strength. “The multidisciplinary and inter-sectoral approachof the project will create a win-win situation for all partners, as well as generate spill-over effects at European level. All partners share a common interest in that they are keen to advance the promotion of healthy eating, in particular vegetable intake. By linking with scientists and industry personnel (both culinary and manufacturer), they offer different perspectives when examining strategies to enhance the health of the EU consumer. The entire value chain is addressed, from the manufacturer (Bonduelle), to recipe development (vehicle of vegetable presentation) up to the end user (the consumer).”
For more information about VeggiEAT, visit their project website
VeggiEAT is funded by the European Commission through a Marie Curie Industry and Academia Partnerships and Pathways (IAPP) grant.
Management students and their study experience at Bournemouth University Department of Tourism and Hospitality! An extraordinary group of students #BUhospitality15https://storify.com/barbaraneuhofer/buhospitality15
Norwegian Cruise Line 2016 Internships- available on MyCareerHub
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Some of the brightest final year students in the country come together at the , this year being held in Manchester. Congratulations and very well done to our Bournemouth University BSc in Tourism and Hospitality students Eleanor Green, Amy Tidball, Eleanor Green, Emily-Jane Stowe, Edwin Lewis and Aaron Wornes for their excellent contribution to research.
One aspect that more and more holidaymakers are looking for is an element of wellness in their holiday; whether it is windsurfing or yoga, spa treatments or adventure trails – a wellness element can enhance, and often sell, a holiday. Despite tourism being such a booming industry, there are still lessons that can be learned to help boost the British tourism industry, which is where research project Destination FeelGood comes in.
Destination FeelGood engages with businesses to help them improve their wellness offering for holidaymakers. The project works with businesses and shows them how to innovate in market positioning while developing strong competitive local tourism economies. Essentially the project looks to encourage businesses to develop wellness packages or elements that will enhance their ability to provide holidaymakers with the type of holiday they are looking for and, in turn, increase footfall and profits.
The project is being led by a team of academics and students at BU. One such student is Carmen Martins, who is studying for her PhD at BU while working on the project. Carmen says: “My research specifically is on rural tourism innovation of which wellbeing is a key feature.” Carmen continues: “Through an increased understanding of how wellbeing can ‘sell’ a holiday for consumers, tourism businesses are well placed to improve their marketing effectiveness, and to develop new products and services that will provide an enhanced experience for visitors to the destination.”
To facilitate the exchange of knowledge, staff from BU’s Faculty of Management, Bournemouth University and theNational Coastal Tourism Academy (NCTA) have beenworking together to develop an integrated programme of activity for businesses across the wider local tourism economy.
The project has been underpinned by research into the tourism industry that has been conducted at Bournemouth University. This research suggests that successful destination marketing may provide the economic impetus to transform local tourism products using wellbeing as a driver for the marketing. The project helps both businesses and destinations to think more carefully about their marketing strategy and how they can better set themselves up to be more attractive to holiday makers seeking rest and relaxation.
Carmen has been working alongside academics such as Professor Heather Hartwell, Professor Adele Ladkin,Professor Ann Hemingway, Professor Stephen Page and Dr Cheryl Willis, as well as the NCTA, to deliver the project as a part of a multidisciplinary team. She says: “Within the team there are tourism academics and health academics and that is what makes the project so unusual. We had support from the Royal Society for Public Health in London. We also had input from students. A number of aspects of the project sought to involve students from Bournemouth University across the tourism, leisure and hospitality sectors to enhance both the project and the student learning experience.”
The project has already had a significant impact for businesses, as Carmen explains: “This project offered the opportunity for connecting different destination stakeholders, with the specific aim of facilitating innovation in healthy lifestyle products while contributing to a competitive local tourism economy. Through inter-stakeholder dialogue, tourism businesses were able to increase their marketing effectiveness, and develop new products and services that would provide an enhanced value-added experience for visitors. The project gave tourism businesses an improved understanding of wellbeing and the confidence to implement this direction within their marketing schema.”
Businesses such as the Sandbanks Hotel and Monty’s Lounge restaurant have been working with the team in ‘ideas cafes’ to come up with ways to innovate and develop more of a wellness offering, as well as looking at ways of promoting this aspect of their business to market to the type of people who find wellness to be an important part of their holiday. Plans are in place to continue to roll the project out across the UK to other businesses and destinations.
For more information visit www.destinationfeelgood.co.uk or follow @DestinationFG on Twitter.
The research was made possible thanks to funding from the Economic and Social Research Council.
Professor Dimitrios Buhalis contributes to the EUROPE WITHOUT BARRIERS : “Accessible Tourism: Opportunity for All” conference at Lucignano Italy 21-22 March 2016
EUROPE WITHOUT BARRIERS
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| Project co-financed by the European Commission | |
“Accessible Tourism: Opportunity for All”
21-22 March 2016 at 9:00
Venue: Rosini Theatre, Via Rosini 25, Lucignano (AR) – Tuscany – Italy
Accommodation: “I Girasoli”, Località Selve di Sotto 89/C, Lucignano (AR) – Tuscany – Italy (www.igirasoli.ar.it)
Programme
Conference, Lucignano (AR), 21-22 March 2016
Rosini Theatre
Via Rosini 25, Lucignano (AR) – Tuscany – Italy
“I Girasoli”
Località Selve di Sotto 89/C, Lucignano (AR) – Tuscany – Italy Official Languages: English – Italian
Digital economy: maintaining family rituals when working away from home
Family Rituals 2.0 is an interdisciplinary research project, drawing on expertise from a number of universities across the UK. The project considered work-life balance for mobile workers and their families, in the context of our digital age. It stemmed from the researchers’ interest in discovering how being away from home affects people’s ability to participate in family activities – or rituals. Family rituals could be celebrations such as birthdays or anniversaries, or simply day-to-day activities such as reading bedtime stories to children. These are the kinds of things that a mobile worker might miss out on while away from home and technology could enable families to continue to enjoy their meaningful family activities even when they’re not together.
There were three stages to the project; the first involved interviews with Human Resource Managers from organisations that employ mobile workers. The second stage was talking to the mobile workers themselves and their families, and the third stage of the project was design-led ethnographic research with five families. In this final stage, the designers and computer scientists designed a prototype technology, which lived with the family as a mechanism to explore the consequences of the absence of a family member and how to maintain important family rituals.
Professor Ladkin’s involvement in the project came about because of her expertise in tourism employment. Business travel is an important sector, and many employees in tourism are routinely mobile due to the nature of their jobs, for example in the case of airline personnel, tour guides and cruise ship workers.
“I think the one thing we look at a lot in tourism is the idea of employees’ health, wellbeing and the work-life balance. It is widely recognised that tourism work can involve long hours, and can involve travel away from home, so an understanding of people’s working environments and how that might impact on their wellbeing has been helpful in this project,” says Professor Ladkin. “My research experience in qualitative data collection and analysis through interviews and diaries also came in useful for this project.”
The team working on the project consisted of sociologists, computer scientists and designers. They came from theUniversity of the West of England, Newcastle University, The Royal College of Art, and Bournemouth University. Between them, the team had a wide range of experience and knowledge, which benefitted everyone, but also presented its challenges at times. “Sometimes it was a challenge to understand our different approaches,” says Professor Ladkin. “For example a designer works in a different way to how I, as a social scientist, would work and both are different again to the way a computer scientist works. We have very different terminology, so we had to work out what each other meant!”
The research results showed that employers were aware of the importance of work-life balance for their employees and had policies in place to support this within their organisations. However, the research also showed that there was a gap in HR policies for managing the work-life balance of mobile workers. “There were no separate HR guidelines to address the different issues that people
who are travelling may encounter, such as physical travel fatigue or managing absence from home and the workplace,” says Professor Ladkin. “There was a degree of awareness of some of the potential issues but no specific 0mechanisms in place to help support the work-life balance of mobile workers.”
Through interviews with the mobile workers and their families, the team learned about the importance of connecting to home and the implications of this for fostering work-life balance. “Our findings to date have centred around understanding what it means to be absent from family during the course of work, how technology can mediate absence, and what organisations might consider to facilitate the work-life balance of mobile workers,” explains Professor Ladkin. “We are particularly keen to take our findings back to organisations who may be seeing a growth in their numbers of mobile workers.”
“We feel there is more work to be done and will be seeking further funding to help continue the research,” continues Professor Ladkin. “We were quite ambitious with our aims and it would be really beneficial to have more time to research this issue.”
The research was presented as part of the London Design Festival in September 2015 and it was also on display at the Science Gallery in Dublin for the ‘Homesick’ exhibition about technology and communication.
Further information on the project can be found at http://familyrituals2-0.org.uk/
The team would like to acknowledge the support of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council as funders of this research.
A collaborative team from Bournemouth University, led by nutrition expert Professor Heather Hartwell, are hoping to change eating habits, by encouraging healthier eating and championing vegetable consumption through a Europe-wide research project called VeggiEAT. From an early age, children are taught about the importance of eating fruit and vegetables, but a quick glance at most nutrition-based news stories will paint a very different picture, a rise of junk food, fast-food consumption and obesity. Adequate vegetable consumption is fundamental to a healthy balanced diet, however EU compliance with dietary guidelines is poor and there is a notable lack of research in this area.
The eTourismLab is really pleases to launching the digital competence benchmarking project
with British Hospitality Association, Tripadvisor.com, Bournemouth Accommodation and Hotel Association (BAHA)
The pilot project will engage postgraduate students, Professor Dimitrios Buhalis and Dr Philip Alford from Bournemouth University, with BHA, BAHA and Tripadvisor to work with local hotel companies in Bournemouth to benchmark their digital competence in four particular areas, namely :
