Business Tourism
ATLAS Special Interest Group
Business Tourism
The Coordinator of this SIG is:
Rob Davidson – MICE Knowledge, United Kinddom
The ATLAS SIG Business Tourism has been active since 2004. Our members are academics who are teaching and researching subjects such as conference management, venue and destination management, business events, or business tourism destination marketing. We also count among our members a number of business tourism practitioners with a professional interest in research in this domain. The Business Tourism SIG acts as a useful forum for the sharing of information and best practice in teaching and researching these subjects. Much of this sharing takes place during our annual Business Tourism Conference which throughout the years since the inception of our SIG has become the most important international annual academic forum for the exchange of ideas and knowledge in this field. The conference takes place each year in a university represented by one or more of our members, and all members are free to propose their facility as a venue for forthcoming conferences. We welcome business tourism industry professionals to participate in this event as speakers or observers, and one day or half-day of the conference is usually hosted by a major conference venue in the city in which the host university is located. Presentations from the conference may be offered for publication in specialist journals such as the Journal of Convention and Event Tourism. In the past, conference papers have also been published in special editions of the ATLAS Advances in Business Tourism Research series.
If you want to contact the SIG coordinator, please fill in the form HERE
If you want to join this SIG, please fill in the form HERE
ATLAS SIG Soundbite 3 – Business Tourism
In the ATLAS SIG Soundbites series the different ATLAS Special Interest Groups tell about their SIG.
Annual review of activities – 2025
The ATLAS Business Tourism SIG has been active since 2004, and each year since then, except during the Covid pandemic, our members have come together at an annual conference.
In 2024, the ATLAS SIG Business Tourism Conference was held in the city of Valencia, Spain, where our host was the Universidad Europea de Valencia, who welcomed us on to their bright new campus between 25 and 27 November. The theme of the conference was ‘Business Tourism, Sustainability, Health and Wellness’, and 25 representatives from 12 different countries participated. Most of the attendees were from European countries, but we also had business tourism academics from Oman and South Africa present.
A range of papers were presented on the conference theme, and there was an excursion to Valencia’s City of Arts and Sciences, where a number of futuristic venues are located. The conference came in serious danger of being cancelled following the severe flooding that devastated parts of the city in October 2024, which lead to the death of 232 people and 10.7 billion euros in damage to Valencia. However, our hosts decided to go ahead with the event, as a sign that Valencia was returning to normal after the disaster. As a humanitarian gesture, they asked each participant to bring children’s toys and educational materials, which were distributed to pupils at a school that had been destroyed in the flood. This initiative was well supported by our attendees.
A number of papers from the 2024 conference will shortly be published in a Special Issue of the Journal of Convention and Event Tourism.