President's Message

I would like to congratulate Karl Wöber, Dan Fesenmaier and Bao Jigang on being elected as the incoming executive of the Academy. They along with Alison Gill will make a fine group to take the organisation to the next level. It would also be remiss not to thank Larry Dwyer for his many years of service to the Academy as President and recently as Chairman of the board. Plus, special thanks should go to Dimitrios Buhalis for the stellar job he has done in organising this year's conference, and to Sara Dolnicar for her contribution as 2nd VP over the past 4 years.

Finally, the videos of 26 Academy Fellows are up and running on our own dedicated YouTube channel. It can be found at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTVNGWa7OS_R4mVjRkFEwEA

I would encourage all of you to promote the channel for it provides an excellent teaching and learning resource. Sara deserves much of the credit as it was her idea to prepare videos. We also have to thank Elsevier which provided the funding to edit the works.

The plan is to continue to make more videos at this year's conference. Come prepared to talk about your contribution to the field. The conference is shaping up nicely. It look like we will have about 60 delegates, which is a good number. The group of invited scholars is very impressive and hopefully most of them will be elected to join the Academy.

As this will probably be my last news letter before handing over the organisation to Charlie, I'd like to thank all for your support over the last four years. We have accomplished a lot. The bylaw revision is a major step towards better governance. The website update makes it more user friendly. Our information initiatives from the guide on how to publish, through providing updates information on journals and NTOs, through to the videos have made a real contribution to our field of study.

Bob
bob.mckercher@polyu.edu.hk