José-Carlos García-Rosell is a Professor of Business Ethics at Oulu Business School, University of Oulu, Finland. Additionally, he holds the position of visiting scholar at the University of Lapland within the Faculty of Social Sciences, at the Multidimensional Tourism Institute (MTI). He also serves as an Associate Professor in Corporate Social Responsibility in Tourism at Tampere University, Finland, and the University of Maribor, Slovenia. He works in the fields of corporate social responsibility, business ethics, responsible tourism business, and responsible management education. His current research agenda focuses on human-animal relations, responsible tourism experiences and experiential learning. He has published in a variety of journals such as Journal of Business Ethics, Management Learning, Journal of Marketing Management, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, Tourism Geographies, Tourism Recreation Research, and Journal of Teaching in Travel & Tourism. He has also co-authored several chapters for books published by Routledge, Palgrave McMillan, Springer, and DeGruyter.
Associate Professor Antti Honkanen, PhD, has worked for decades as a tourism scholar. His background is in economic sociology, but he has specialized in tourism, leisure, and event studies. He is working as CEO of Visitory Ltd, a company that provides data and tools for knowledge management in the tourism business. He is also working as a part-time senior researcher at the Biodiversity Unit of the University of Turku. Previously, Antti Honkanen has been the director of tourism research units at two Finnish universities. He was a board member of the Finnish Society for Tourism Research from 2004 to 2020 and its chairman from 2010 to 2019. His research interests include tourism statistics, festivals, travel motivations, and quantitative methods.
Professor, emerita Raija Komppula has been Professor of Marketing, especially Tourism Business, at the University of Eastern Finland, Business School. Her research interests include research on tourist experience, customer involvement in new service development in tourism, destination branding, market orientation, small business research and entrepreneurship, cooperation and networks. She has conducted research on these topics especially in the context of nature based and rural tourism, and recently in wellbeing and social tourism. She has had several positions of trust in tourism industry in Finland, and she is member of AIEST, TRC (Tourist Research Center) and ISTO. She was chairperson of the Finnish Society for Tourism Research from 2021-2023.
Scott McCabe is Chair in Marketing at Birmingham Business School. He received his PhD from the University of Derby in 2001, which focused on how visitors to the Peak District National Park constructed their motivations and behaviours through accounts of their experiences. He has become an internationally renowned scholar in tourism studies through his subsequent research career. His main interests are in the effects of supported holiday opportunities for bottom of the pyramid consumers. His research conducted with a range of UK charities on the needs for and wellbeing outcomes of a simple break away from home for severely disadvantaged families was submitted as an impact case for the REF 2014. He is also interested in emotions in consumer experiences, responsible and ethical tourism, the role of marketing in promoting greater sustainability in the travel and tourism industry and in socio-linguistics as a methodology. He is currently the co-editor in Chief of the Annals of Tourism Research and serves on the editorial board of Tourism Management.
Juho Pesonen is a professor of tourism business and deputy head of the department at University of Eastern Finland Business School. He is a member of the Tourism Business research group and the director of the International Master’s Degree Programme in Tourism Marketing and Management. Prof. Pesonen completed his Ph.D. in marketing at University of Eastern Finland, focusing on market segmentation in rural tourism. Now his research focuses on understanding how tourism businesses can survive and thrive in the digital and sustainability transformations. Prof. Pesonen also has the title of Adjunct Professor of digital marketing at University of Turku. He has widely published his research in dozens of peer-reviewed academic journals and has edited several books in the tourism field. He also holds several board positions in companies and associations.
Outi Rantala, PhD, Professor, Responsible Arctic Tourism, at University of Lapland, Finland and Adjunct professor, Environmental Humanities, at University of Turku, Finland, has focused in her research activities on creating critical, reflective and alternative narratives on northern tourism. Rantala has acted as the principal investigator and leader for several of the Intra-living in the Anthropocene research group’s research projects. In addition, she holds a position as Arctic Five Chair on Tourism and Climate Emergency. What she enjoys most in the academia, is the collaboration with inspiring researchers and students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. Rantala is an active member of several research networks, such as the OnebyWalking Network, Adventure Tourism Research Association, Sustainable Change Research Network, and University of Arctic’s Thematic Network on Northern Tourism.
