e-Conference

Dear EATSA friend,

We thank all the people who submitted an abstract or a paper for the 2020 EATSA conference.

As you all well aware, we are experiencing an exceptional period in time, which is very difficult for many of you, and especially for us here in Italy. As an association we have a social responsibility to protect our members’ health and safety. Still, we want to cope with the moment and work to keep our network strong. Hence, given the international situation and uncertainty of the future, this conference can only be done as an online conference. In this way, we will be able to support the academic community and Italy at the same time.

There are many changes, so please read carefully and contact us if you have any questions.

For logistical reasons, we will bring the online conference forward a week earlier from 15th to 18th June.

Earlier this year, EATSA was formalized as an association based in France. Having a formal association means complying by legal rules and having the opportunity at the same time to source for EU funding. Therefore, the General assembly will be essential this year. During the assembly we will have to organize the roles of members in our association, to choose the proposal for the conference in 2021 and to vote for the next president.

We should think of the conference more as a pilot project, rather than as a classical conference.  This can serve as an opportunity for us to learn how to collaborate online for future researches. We must be available to change the way we work. The Coronavirus has changed some paradigms, and most likely, we will experience behavioural changes in the hospitality sector. This is a great opportunity to find new topics for our future researches.

The idea of the Tourism Cafe Labs proposed by Ali Afshar & Desmond Wee will be adapted to the situation for looking into the future of our researches.  Every day, the last session will be opened by keynote speakers who will propose motivating topics and questions for the future. Then, we could devote the following time to the discussion and preparation of future research projects.

The idea of Sharing Experiences On Publishing proposed by Lucília Cardoso and Francisco Dias may turn into a regular appointment after the conference. We can organise a monthly webinar where anyone can share their own experience on publishing in scientific journals.

More time for the EATSA community means a little bit less for each of us.

We will have to make the effort to present our papers in a very short time.

This for several reasons:

1) Audiences online have relatively short attention span, in any case, much shorter than in face to face conferences

2) We will not use slides as it could be technically complex, and adds to the time of the presentation

3) We received about 60 excellent abstracts, so in order to allow everyone to present their speech, we must all agree to reduce the presentation time

4) Being an international conference, we have a window of only three hours to work together (from 10:00 CET to 13:30 CET), in order to allow all members from Japan to Portugal to participate at acceptable times.

We should think of it as an exercise in style. We should present our work in 5 minutes. In order to be more efficient, we can focus mainly on research questions and conclusions or use the Elevator Pitch technique for improving the speech (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevator_pitch).

Whatever the case may be, we will all be available for discussing our work before and after the conference. In order to create interactions between the audience and the participants, all the abstracts will be sent to registered participants 1 month before the conference. In this way, those who wish to, may contact the author of the abstract, using Skype, WhatsApp, Zoom or other communication tools. All members will be able to vote for the best abstracts until the 11 of June using the Condorcet voting method. The awards will be conferred before the General Assembly.

We will publish the proceedings with abstracts and full papers at the end of the conference with e-ISBN number.

The best full paper may be published on the Euro Asia Tourism Studies Journal

(https://www.eatsa-researches.org/journal/) edited by Kevser Çınar, after passing a double-blind review process.

With the shift online, the conference fees will be reduced substantially:

• 75€ for Participants (includes the 40€ for the EATSA association membership + Certificate of Attendance)
• Free for Visitors. The conference will be broadcasted for free. Please register with us for the associated links.

Remember to register for the conference by 25^th of May 2020 at https://www.eatsa-researches.org/2020/registration-econference/

We really hope to make our conference a part of the paradigm shift.