On October 12-13, 2021, the 3rd International Tourism and Retail Service Management Conference (TRMC 2021), hosted by Sunway University in Malaysia and co-organized by Nankai University, Macau Institute for Tourism Studies and University of South Carolina in USA, was successfully held online. The theme of the conference was "Developing Sustainable Travel Retail", focusing on travel retail management, motivation and experience, marketing innovation, and topics related to COVID-19. The conference attracted more than 200 travel experts, teachers and students in universities, and industry professionals from 13 countries.
The conference lasted for two days and 10 hours in total, with rich and cutting-edge content. The conference agenda is divided into "Welcome Speech", "Keynote Speech", "Group Sessions", and "Paper Presentation ". In the welcome speech session, Prof. Qiu Hanqin, Dean of the college, Prof. Perry Hobson, Chairman of TRMC 2021, and Prof. Marcus L. Stephenson, Dean of School of Hotel and Service Management of Sunway University, delivered their welcome speeches in turn, thanking the participants for their support to the TRMC 2021, reviewing the previous conferences and hoping that all participants would actively participate in this conference and have an in-depth discussion on the sustainable development of travel retail in the post-epidemic era.
In the keynote speech session, two famous experts gave speeches on the topics of travel retail and new travel technologies. Prof. Dallen Timothy from Arizona State University gave a speech titled "The Place and Importance of Tourism in Today's Retail Environment", sharing information on tourism shopping behavior, tourism souvenirs, local branding under shopping behavior and leisure shopping behavior under the epidemic. Prof. Ming-Hui Huang of National Taiwan University, editor-in-chief of Journal of Service Research, focused on the interaction between artificial intelligence technology and the feeling economy and the future direction of development, providing new ideas for the application of new technologies in tourism research.
In the group session, Prof. Perry Hobson had a lively discussion with Mr. KS Wong, Senior General Manager of Sunway Mall, and Mr. Paul Gibbons, General Manager of Sports Direct and MST Golf Management Malaysia, on the current dilemma, future direction and sustainability of the tourism industry and retail industry.
There were 19 thematic sessions in the conference, and each session was arranged to share 3-5 academic papers for presentation. After each participant's presentation, the session moderators made serious comments and actively guided the participants to ask questions and discuss the presentations.
In this conference, our faculty and students actively participated and performed enthusiastically. 60 faculty and students registered for this conference, and 49 students (including undergraduates) participated in this conference, which is a record high for our students to participate in international conferences, fully demonstrating the confidence and elegance of our students in the international platform! Our faculty and students shared a total of 14 research papers in this conference, among which, the research paper "An Explorative Study of Memorable Tourism Experience for Older Tourists: Based on Embodiment Cognitive Theory" reported by our teacher Huang Jing's team won the best paper award of the conference. This conference is an important practice for the collective export of the South China Travel brand!
