🧭 Broad Area of Supervision

Tourism, Hospitality & Destination Marketing** — with a secondary fit for **Marketing & Consumer Behaviour** more broadly, given his PhD is in Marketing specifically rather than Tourism as a discrete discipline.

🔎 Specialist sub-areas:

• Risk, crisis and safety in tourism
• Destination marketing and branding
• Visitor behaviour and decision-making
• Destination competitiveness
• Sustainable and island/peripheral tourism
• Tourism in African and emerging markets.

Dr Richard George is a tourism marketing and destination development specialist with over 28 years of international experience across academia, consultancy, and industry. He holds a PhD in Marketing from the University of Cape Town, where he later served as Associate Professor of Marketing and Director of the Tourism Research Unit, and currently serves as Head of Academics at UeCampus in the UK. He is the author of *Marketing Tourism and Hospitality: Concepts and Cases* (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) and *Marketing Tourism in South Africa* (Oxford University Press), and supervises both traditional PhD and professional doctorate candidates.

📄 Full Profile

Dr Richard George brings 28 years of international experience across academia, consultancy, and industry to doctoral supervision at IDEAS. His work sits at the meeting point of destination marketing theory and applied strategic practice, and his supervisory approach reflects that dual grounding — candidates are expected to produce conceptually rigorous work that also speaks to the decisions destinations and tourism businesses actually face.

He holds a PhD in Marketing from the University of Cape Town, one of Africa’s leading research universities, where he went on to hold the posts of Associate Professor of Marketing and Director of the Tourism Research Unit. His doctoral thesis — on the personal and situational factors influencing long-haul travellers’ decision-making in relation to terrorism and crime risk — established risk perception, traveller safety, and destination vulnerability as lasting themes in his research, and he is well placed to supervise candidates working on crisis and risk in tourism, destination recovery after security incidents, and the marketing response of destinations carrying a negative safety image. An earlier Master’s degree in Tourism and Social Responsibility from the University of Exeter, examining the image of Northern Cyprus as a destination, seeded a parallel interest in destination image and island tourism that continues through his later work, including a published case study on managing tourist impact on Saint Helena.

He is an established author — *Marketing Tourism and Hospitality: Concepts and Cases* (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) and *Marketing Tourism in South Africa* (Oxford University Press), alongside international journal articles and book chapters on destination competitiveness, tourism marketing, and sustainable tourism development — and is well placed to support candidates not just through the thesis itself, but through converting doctoral work into publishable outputs, often where early-career researchers need the most structured guidance.

His consultancy portfolio gives doctoral candidates access to live research settings and practitioner networks, spanning destination marketing strategy, tourism development plans, destination branding, visitor perception research, competitiveness assessment, and stakeholder engagement — most recently leading the research component of the *Go Limpopo! Tourism, Trade and Investment Vision 2030* destination marketing strategy for the Limpopo Tourism Agency. Having lived and worked in the UK, South Africa, Australia, India, and the United States, he brings a comparative, cross-cultural perspective to supervision, and welcomes candidates researching contexts beyond the Global North.

🔬 Areas of Research Interest

Risk, Safety & Security in Tourism Personal and situational determinants of perceived risk · terrorism, crime and political instability as influences on destination choice · long-haul traveller decision-making under uncertainty · destination image repair and recovery marketing · safety communication ethics for destination marketing organisations

Destination Marketing & Branding Destination image formation and change · place branding and positioning · DMO strategy and effectiveness · nation branding and tourism · digital and social media in destination promotion

Visitor Behaviour & Consumer Decision-Making Tourist decision-making and destination choice models · visitor perception and satisfaction · motivation, expectation and experience research · segmentation and market profiling · the intention–behaviour gap in travel

Destination Competitiveness & Development Destination competitiveness models and application · tourism product development · tourism, trade and investment linkages · regional/provincial tourism strategy · destination lifecycle and repositioning

Sustainable & Responsible Tourism Managing visitor impact in fragile and remote destinations · community participation and benefit distribution · responsible tourism policy implementation · tourism and local economic development

Island & Peripheral Destination Tourism Small island tourism management · carrying capacity and access constraints · island destination image and differentiation · tourism in remote and hard-to-reach destinations

Tourism in Emerging & African Markets Tourism development in Southern and sub-Saharan Africa · destination marketing in resource-constrained public sector settings · stakeholder engagement and public-private partnership in tourism governance

Tourism & Hospitality Education Curriculum design and employability in tourism/hospitality programmes · transnational and online delivery of tourism education

🤝 Supervisory Approach & Methodological Range

Dr George supervises qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods doctoral projects. His own doctoral work was quantitative and empirical, testing the influence of personal and situational variables on traveller decision-making, so he is comfortable supervising survey design, scale development and adaptation, hypothesis testing, and multivariate analysis. He is equally experienced in case study design, stakeholder interviewing, and applied strategy research conducted in partnership with tourism agencies and industry bodies. He welcomes both traditional PhD candidates and professional doctorate candidates whose research is embedded in their own organisational practice, and encourages work that produces recommendations of practical value to destinations, agencies, and operators alongside a clear theoretical contribution.

🎯 Ideal Candidate Fit

Ready to talk about doctoral admissions, supervision, or researcher development? Contact the Knowledge Edge team.