Dr. Brent Ritchie’s (University of Queensland) key area of academic expertise lies in unlocking the potential of niche tourism.
“I specialise in niche tourism segments such as sport, event and educational tourism. I also have an interest in tourism crisis and disaster management, the use of tourism as a regional economic development tool and capital city tourism,” says Dr. Ritchie.
Dr. Ritchie recently designed a research program to estimate the size and economic value of school excursions to Australia’s capital city, Canberra. This helped the National Capital Educational Tourism Project win the best tourism marketing project at the 2005 National Tourism Awards.
“I work with industry and government sectors to provide a better understanding of the size and value of niche markets. This includes the development of tools such as procedure manuals and survey templates to help industry measure the economic value of events and educational or cultural facilities such as museums”.
Dr Ritchie’s niche tourism know-how is applied and respected worldwide, with his research and studies taking him to New Zealand, the UK, Italy and Australia.
He was the invited keynote presenter at the Pre-Olympic Sport Tourism conference in Greece in 2004, and has convened two international conferences on sport tourism in 2000 and ecotourism in 2002. Dr. Ritchie has undertaken consultancy work with the Council of Europe on educational tourism, and was an advisor for an international consortium on the economic impact of museums and science centres.
Dr. Ritchie has published books as a sole author and joint editor including the books ‘Managing Educational Tourism’ (2003), ‘Sport Tourism: Interrelationships, Impacts and Issues’ (2004) and ‘Tourism Research Methods: Integrating Theory with Practice’ (2005). Brent is on the editorial board of the Journal of Sport Tourism and has acted as a reviewer for tourism, sport and leisure journals.
