Spotlights
GVSU students help struggling CVBs with travel research
Michigan's hospitality and tourism industry has been devastated by the pandemic, so Patty Janes, professor of GVSU Hospitality & Tourism Management (HTM), decided to challenge her research students to put theory into practice with a real-world opportunity.
“In my (prior) research classes, we weren’t helping (CVBs),” she said. “My research classes were conducting research about industry topics and issues and (students) were collecting data, but they were pilot research studies. That is what we would call them. We did community-based learning, but we weren’t working with organizations directly. We were working on industry issues overall, but the pandemic and COVID really forced me to look at how we could help individual destinations or organizations.”
“We were very appreciative of the opportunity for Grand Valley State University to work with us on this,” Dana Wagner, director of marketing and communications for Discover Kalamazoo said. “We were able to get some great insight from this information and it was good to be able to provide this experience for the students as well, so they can learn some real-world examples.”
Read full Grand Rapids Business Journal article
Interest Area(s)
Hospitality Tourism Mgt
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