Zheng Xiang, PhD, is an associate professor in the Howard Feiertag Department of Hospitality and Tourism Management in the Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech, USA. His research focuses on the strategic implications of information technologies for the hospitality and tourism industry. He currently serves as president of the International Federation for IT and Travel & Tourism (IFITT) and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Information Technology & Tourism (SSCI; Scopus). He has published more than 90 peerreviewed journal articles, conference papers, and book chapters. He has co-authored one textbook Tourism Information Technology (third edition) and co-edited two books related to concepts and methods in data analytics in hospitality and tourism management. In May 2015, he received the “Emerging Scholar of Distinction” award from the International Academy for the Study of Tourism. Recently, he was designated by the Web of Science Group as a “Highly Cited Researcher” (0.1% among researchers around the world) 2 years in a row (2019–2020) based upon citations to his work in the last decade. Xiang holds a PhD in business administration from Temple University.Matthias Fuchs, PhD, is a Full Professor of Tourism Studies at Mid Sweden University, Östersund, Sweden. His research interests include electronic tourism (e.g., business intelligence and data mining applications in tourism, online auctions), customer-based destination brand equity modeling, and socio-economic impact analysis. Matthias serves the editorial board of the Journal of Travel Research, the Annals of Tourism Research, the Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Management, and Tourism Analysis. Matthias is also an associate editor of the Journal of Information Technology & Tourism. A number of his co-authored articles have received the best paper award at international conferences. Matthias has been the research track chair of the conference ENTER@Helsingborg, 2012, and the overall chair of the conference ENTER@Jöngköping, 2018. He was a board member of the International Federation for IT and Travel & Tourism (IFITT) during the period 2014–2018. Matthias holds a PhD in business administration from Innsbruck University, Austria.Dr. Ulrike Gretzel is a senior fellow at the Center of Public Relations, University of Southern California, and serves as director of research at Netnografica. She received her PhD in communications from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is a fellow of the International Academy for the Study of Tourism. Her research focuses on technology-mediated communication and persuasion in digital media. Her expertise spans the design and evaluation of intelligent systems, as well as the development and implications of artificial intelligence. Her work in tourism addresses ways in which tourists engage with each other and with tourism organizations through websites, mobile apps, and social media, and has analyzed how tourism experiences are represented and marketed online. She studies social media marketing, influencer marketing, and the emerging reputation economy. She has also researched smart tourism development, technology adoption and non-adoption in tourism organizations, and the quest for digital detox experiences. Dr. Gretzel has published more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and has co-edited two books. She is frequently acknowledged as one of the most cited authors in the fields of tourism and persuasionDr. Wolfram Höpken is professor of Business Informatics and e-Business at the University of Applied Sciences Ravensburg-Weingarten and director of the Institute for Digital Transformation. His main research fields are data science and big data analytics as well as ICT systems in tourism. He has been involved in several research projects in the area of knowledge discovery and big data analytics within tourism destinations as well as semantic web and seamless data interchange in tourism (EU-funded projects Harmonise, HarmoTEN, Euromuse, HarmoSearch). Wolfram Höpken has been vice president, commercial director, and member of the management board of IFITT for more than 15 years. He has been research track chair of the ENTER conference 2009 and overall chair of ENTER 2014. He has chaired the CEN/ISSS workshop eTOUR dealing with harmonization in the field of tourism. Wolfram Höpken has published over 70 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and is associate editor of the Journal of Information Technology & Tourism.
