IFITT Awards were presented to the winners during ENTER2019 eTourism conference in Nicosia (Cyprus).
Pictures from the ENTER2019 conference and awards ceremony will be available soon.
Each year, IFITT proudly awards innovative technology-savvy organizations working in the eTourism field, as well as outstanding research contributions.
In 2019 awards in nine different categories were presented during the gala dinner on Thursday, 31 January 2019.
IFITT Hannes Werthner Tourism and Technology Lifetime Achievement Award
The Hannes Werthner Tourism and Technology Lifetime Achievement Award is given to an individual from academia, industry or government, who has made significant contributions to the advancement of the field/practice of tourism and technology.
The winner of 2019 award is Professor Oriol Miralbell , Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain)
IFITT Journal Paper of the Year Award
Tussyadiah, I. P., Wang, D., Jung, T. H., & tom Dieck, M. C. (2018). Virtual reality, presence, and attitude change: Empirical evidence from tourism. Tourism Management, 66, 140-154.
IFITT Thesis Excellence Award
The Thesis Excellence Award awards students who successfully defended their theses in the field of tourism and technology between October 1, 2017 and September 30, 2018.
Category Master thesis: Mete Sertkan (Technical University of Vienna). “ Classifying and Mapping e-Tourism data sets”.
Category PhD thesis: Eva Martin-Fuentes (University of Lleida, Spain). “Tourism Surveying from Social Media: The Validity of User-Generated Content (UGC) for the Characterization of Lodging Rankings”.
ENTER Conference Best Paper Award 2019
David Massimo and Francesco Ricci: “Clustering Users’ POIs Visit Trajectories for Next-POI Recommendation”.
Ludovik Coba, Markus Zanker and Laurens Rook: “Decision Making Based on Bimodal Rating: Summary Statistics – An Eye-Tracking Study of Hotels”.
C.K. Bruce Wan: “Exploring a Travel Diary That Promotes Wellbeing – Synergy Between Oral and Visual Narratives of Memorable and Meaningful Experiences”.
JITT Article of the Year Award 2019
Sertkan, M., Neidhardt, J., & Werthner, H. (2018). “What is the Personality” of a tourism destination?”. Information Technology & Tourism, 1-29.
IFITT Best PhD Proposal Award 2019
Chao Ling, University of Surrey (UK), “Determinants of Continuance Intention to Use Artificial Intelligence in the Context of Travel”.
Yuliya Kolomoyets, MODUL University Vienna (Austria), “A Text Mining Approach to Measuring and Predicting Service Quality from Online Chatter”.
Qianxia Chen, College of Tourism and Service Management, Nankai University (China), “Can Baidu Index Improve the Hotel Room Demand Forecasting by Machine Learning Methods?”.
IFITT ICT4D Scholarship
André Luiz Vieira Soares, Universidade Federal do rio Grande do Norte (Brazil)
Best IFITTtalks of the year
IFITTtalk@Adelaide (Australia) – Longevity workshop on July 26 and 22 November, 2018, organized by University of South Australia (UniSA).
IFITTtalk@Nairobi (Kenya) – workshop on 8th November, 2018, jointly organized by IFITT, Mount Kenya University, Kenyatta University and Karatina University.
ETourism industry contribution IFITT Award
Cyprus Minister of Tourism