Zheng "Phil" Xiang awarded with Eminent Scholars Endowment

My research is really about understanding how technology is changing travel, changing tourism, changing how people consume hospitality services. And because of that, and how does that change the fabrics of the industry? This goes back to say, 20 years ago, right. In all of a sudden Internet was changing everything we do, right. We go about looking for information for products, looking for information, for travel for vacation. Planning for your vacation, it's something that is quite different from what you do say for buying a consumer product. What does it mean? Or how technology actually changes the space of, you know, planning for vacation. And what does that mean from an industry's point of view? It changes the structure of the representation of the tourism experiences. If you look at this, you know, dominant search engines. People tend to see those information from the big players, right. Big hotel chains, or big online travel agencies. They tend to dominate the information space. Well, it creates a problem for the rest of of the industry, right. Where are the little guys? What can we do for them? We started actually looking at, for example, search engines as a way, as a representation tool. And how we can leverage search engines to promote those small businesses. It's about human experiences, right. How we can use today's technology to make sure consumers can have good access to information, to have an equitable way of using products.