Tourism Professor receives acclaimed award for the second time in career

4 Jul 2016
Professor Sara Dolnicar and Professor Charles Goeldner

UQ Business School tourism expert Professor Sara Dolnicar has been awarded the prestigious Charles R. Goeldner Article of Excellence Award at the annual Travel & Tourism Research Association 2016 Conference.

This is the second time Professor Dolnicar has received this award. She is one of the only two people ever to win this award twice in their career.

The association initiated the award to recognise the best article published in the Journal of Travel Research, one of the three internationally leading journals in tourism, during the preceding year. It’s named in honour of the founder and editor of the Journal, Charles R. Goeldner.

Professor Dolnicar’s article ‘Do satisfied tourists really intend to come back? Three concerns with empirical studies linking satisfaction to behavioural intentions’ was deemed the best article of 2015 by the Journal editor and the committee.

Explaining human behaviour is a primary concern for tourism research and a substantial body of research concludes that highly satisfied tourists are more likely to return to a particular destination.

The article provides an analysis of this previous research, arriving at three concerns relating to the strength of association between satisfaction and behavioural intention.

Professor Dolnicar said it is a great honour to win the Charles Goeldner Award and it’s special to her on a personal level.

“Since I studied tourism at university twenty years ago, I have been a big fan of the Journal of Travel Research, so I feel I have a pretty long relationship with the journal. It is therefore extra special for our work to be acknowledged by the Journal of Travel Research.

“I am also a huge admirer of Charles Goeldner. He is a pioneer of tourism research and stands for everything I respect in a professor, and at the end of his career he is still full of passion for the future of tourism research and the next generation of tourism researchers,” she said.

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