93 A TOURISM RESEARCH JOURNEY: FROM HEAD TO HEART – Contributions by Pauline J.
93 A TOURISM RESEARCH JOURNEY: FROM HEAD TO HEART – Contributions by Pauline J. Sheldon
Beginning the Academic Journey
Degrees in mathematics and economics were foundational to my academic career. Choosing tourism as a field of study to which to apply quantitative modelling and data skills, opened up a vast research area for me. I began with a dissertation studying the phenomenon of package tours from an economic perspective. I used mode choice modelling to explore the factors affecting the demand for package tours (Sheldon & Mak, 1987) and used industrial analysis frameworks to learn more about the supply side of tour packaging (Sheldon, 1986). Continuing with demand choice modelling I went on to study mode choice in other types of travel such as incentive travel (Sheldon, 1994; 1995). I also did some forecasting of tourism expenditures and arrivals using economic models (Sheldon & Var, 1985; Sheldon, 1993).
When I was still living in the UK before doing my doctoral work, I read a book called Tourism: Blessing or Blight (Young, 1973). This book influenced me greatly and sowed the seeds of many questions about tourism’s role in society. As I was exercising my tourism economic muscles, I was acutely aware of the inadequacy of economic models alone to understand the complex phenomenon of tourism. I embarked on some studies of resident perceptions of tourism in North Wales (Sheldon, 1984) and Hawai’i (Liu, Sheldon & Var, 1987; Sheldon & Abenoja, 2001) and found this more satisfying than economic modelling. This was the beginning of broadening my scope of research.
At the Beginning of Information Technology and Tourism
As I started my teaching career, information technology (IT) was starting to shake up the tourism industry. I had studied management information systems as a minor in my PhD program, so my Dean asked me to develop our curriculum in this area. I did not know enough to teach so I started to research IT’s impact on all sectors of our industry. There was almost nothing written at the time, so I did studies on how IT was affecting hotels (Sheldon, 1983a), how computer reservation systems were changing travel distribution channels (Sheldon 1993b), and how IT was changing the nature of the industry itself (Var, Liu, Sheldon & Boberg, 1986). This work equipped me to design and teach the curriculum in this rapidly changing field. The next step was to write the textbook (Sheldon, 1997) which mapped out the applications and impact of IT on different sectors of tourism. The book has been published in three editions over twenty years. In recent editions I invited younger, more technically savvy co-authors to work with me (Benckendorff, Sheldon & Fesenmaier, 2014; Benckendorff, Xiang & Sheldon, 2019).
Governments were starting to use IT and customer and product databases to manage their destinations. Much of the progressive work was being done in Europe, so during my sabbatical in 2001, I visited about eight European countries and interviewed destin