Director:
Professor Deng Aimin
Research Interests:
1) Rural Tourism
2) Tourism Planning
3) Tourism Marketing
4) Tourism Industry
Introduction:
Research Institute of Tourism of ZUEL (the Institute) was founded by a research team with reasonable structure, strong research capability and great influence. At present, the Institute has 15 stuff, including 5 professors, 7 associate professors and 3 lecturers. In order to make tourism research more scientific, forward-looking and pragmatic, the Institute has signed a long-term cooperation agreement with the Resource Development Department of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the PRC, strengthening academic exchanges and cooperation and building a high-quality cultural and tourism think tank with Chinese characteristics. Moreover, it has successively been approved as the “Double Leader” Studio of Teacher and Party Branch Secretary and the “Hubei Teacher Studio”.
In recent years, the Institute has successively established 5 national-level projects and 8 provincial and ministerial-level projects. It has made fruitful results with more than 60 academic papers published in top journals at home and abroad and more than 10 books. The Institute actively utilizes the advantages of professional think tanks. Professor Deng Aimin, the Director of the Institute, employed as a decision-making and consulting expert for the governments of Wuhan and Hubei Province, actively provided advice for government decision-making. In 2020, three consulting reports were commented by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the Hubei Provincial Committee of the Chinese people’s Political Consultative Conference and the Wuhan Municipal People’s Government. Additionally, the Institute actively develops its professional advantages. It promoted tourism in poor villages to alleviate poverty and compiled more than 100 rural tourism poverty alleviation plans for free, including Maishi Town in Tongshan County and Yangshikeng Village in Dalu Township, Tongcheng County, to advance poverty alleviation and rural revitalization. Among them, the poverty alleviation case “School-enterprise collaboration to help poverty alleviation and build picturesque countryside” was awarded as an excellent typical case of the first tourism alleviation assisted by universities by the Ministry of Education, and the plans of Enshi Grand Canyon and Daye Longfeng Mountain were selected as the cases of tourism poverty reduction by the World Federation.