Earlier this month, Dr. Irit Shmuel, a faculty member at the School of Management at JMC, presented her research at the Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Leisure Studies (CALS) in Toronto, Canada.

Her presentation, “Skills, Knowledge, and Emotion in Tourism: Hot Air Ballooning in Cappadocia, Turkey as a Case Study,” was based on a collaborative study with Prof. Paolo Mura from Zayed University (UAE). The research analyzes Israeli media coverage and identifies three types of skills that tourists develop through the ballooning experience.

The session sparked great interest and contributed to expanding academic discussion on tourist skill-building, an emerging topic in the era of experiential tourism.