Professor Leo Jago OAM
About
Biography
Leo is an Emeritus Professor in the School of Hospitality and Tourism Management. Prior to his retirement from Surrey he was Professor in Hospitality and Events and Head of Department of Hospitality. He joined the University of Surrey in August 2014 after three years as the inaugural Chief Economist and General Manager of Tourism Research Australia, where he was responsible for the establishment and management of Australia's national tourism research agenda.Prior to that, Leo spent 12 years as Professor and Director of university research centres in Australia and the UK, including six years as deputy CEO and Director of Research for Australia's national Cooperative Research Centre for Sustainable Tourism, which was a partnership between industry, government and academe.Leo's research has focused on events both business events and major events where he has undertaken research on behalf of international agencies such as the UNWTO and the Joint Meetings Industry Council. He was the foundation editor of the International Journal of Festival and Event Management.In addition to his academic experience, Leo owned and operated a range of successful tourism and hospitality businesses over a period of 18 years. His time as an operator underpinned his passion for communicating the outcomes of academic research in forms that are accessible to industry and government stakeholders.Leo is an inaugural Fellow of CAUTHE and was awarded an OAM in the Queen's Birthday Honours List for services to the tourism industry and education.
Research interests
- The holistic impact of events
- The contribution of business events to knowledge creation & dissemination
- Labour turnover
- SME management
- Performance benchmarking
Affiliations
- Fellow of CAUTHE
- Fellow of ATRi
- International Advisory Board Member of BEST EN
- International Advisory Board Member of IFEA
- Advisory Board Member of Griffith Institute for Tourism
- Advisory Board Member of Australian Centre for Event Management
- Visiting Professor at Edinburgh Napier University
Publications
This paper examines the process of corporate greening, and proposes a general conceptual model of the process, which may be relevant in a number of different corporate sectors. The model includes drivers of greening and barriers to greening and also the organisational context in which greening decisions are taken. In addition, this paper considers the role of media coverage in influencing pro-environmental behaviour amongst organisations. The paper then tests the model in one particular tourism context - that of business events - in order to ascertain the specific nature of the corporate greening process in that context. The paper concludes that the general model may be applied to a number of industry sectors, and the model specific to business events tourism may be used to underpin future research in this area. © 2010 Taylor & Francis.
The purpose of this study is to examine the interaction effect between online Cause-Related Marketing (CRM) advertisements and brand reputation on consumers’ brand evaluation in the hotel industry. Two experimental studies were conducted: (1) a survey-based experiment that demonstrates the moderating role of brand reputation, and (2) a laboratory experiment using psychophysiological measurements of emotional reactions that additionally examines the impact of consumers’ emotional responses to CRM advertisements on hotel’s pro-social initiatives, thereby complementing Study I’s findings.
A must-have introductory text of unrivalled coverage and depth focusing on events planning and management, the fourth edition of Events Management provides a complete A to Z of the principles and practices of planning, managing and staging events. The book offers a systematic guide to organising successful events, examining areas such as event design, logistics, marketing, human resource management, financial planning, risk management, impacts, evaluation and reporting. The fourth edition has been fully updated and revised to include content covering technology, including virtual and hybrid events, concepts such as social capital, soft power and events, social inclusion, equality, accessibility and diversity, and the latest industry reports, research and legal frameworks. The book is logically structured and features new case studies, showing real-life applications and highlighting issues with planning events of all types and scales in a range of geographical locations. This book has been dubbed 'the events management bible' and fosters an interactive learning experience amongst scholars of events management, tourism and hospitality.
This study investigates employee perceptions of, and preferences for, management practices within a five-star, medium-sized hotel. In particular, the study examines the hypothesis that hotel managers have become more consultative. Using longitudinal data over a 4-yr period, the study examines the perceptions of staff of the management practices and styles in the changing environment of one hotel. The findings suggest that, while staff prefer a decisive style of management, supervisors and department heads were perceived as being autocratic. In fact, in the 4yr over which the data had been collected, the style of management had become less consultative and more autocratic. Implications for management are discussed, as are recommendations for future research. © 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.
In response to the academic need to reconcile economic impact and cost-benefit analysis and the commensurability among multi-dimensional event impacts, this research stresses the net benefit of staging mega-events. Compared with the abundant research on benefits, there has been a limited focus on pricing social costs, which poses a problem. Taking the Canton Fair as a case study, this study examines the integration of the event-induced traffic-related social cost into the economic scope and explores how residents value the cost. The result indicates that the residents bore ¥20.21 traffic-related event social cost per day per person on average during the fair, which is approximately ¥6.19 for each ¥100 of economic benefit derived from hosting the fair. It was found that time loss, financial loss, and transportation mode change were significantly correlated with the individuals’ valuation. The results offer an empirical glimpse of the trade-off between personal cost and collective benefit and provide new insights into valuing externalities with no market value. Practical implications arising from this project are considered for future researchers, organizers of mega-events, and destination management departments. •This study builds on the call for cost-benefit and holistic event evaluations.•We examined the traffic-related social cost by using contingent valuation.•The respondents bore ¥20.21/day social cost on average during the Canton Fair.•Each ¥100 economic benefit was got at the expense of ¥6.19 traffic social cost.•Time loss, transportation expense, and mode change are influence factors.
This article contributes to theory concerning collaborative innovation through stakeholder engagement with reference to Glasgow City Marketing Bureau's (GCMB) management strategies, which represent UK best practice in events procurement, leveraging and destination branding. The research adopts a case study design to facilitate an in-depth evaluation of the DMO’s critical success factors. Multiple perspectives on GCMB’s collaborative innovation are achieved through semi-structured interviews with senior managers from the bureau, key stakeholders and other DMOs. GCMB’s success results from long term, extensive, collaborative engagement, a unique institutional structure and sustained political and financial support through to transformational leadership, strategic event selection and targeted marketing through ‘earned’ distribution channels. The study takes a single case study approach and focuses on GCMB’s event-led branding strategy. Given the importance but relative neglect of long term inter-personal relationships in collaborative innovation, future research should focus on the development of social capital and adopt a longitudinal perspective. The paper provides insights into the collaborative innovation process with a range of stakeholders, which underpins GCMB’s events strategy and its leveraging of the city brand. In particular, the study highlights the need for entrepreneurial leadership and the development of long-term relationships for effective engagement with stakeholders. Previous research has focussed on outcomes and neglected pre-requisites and the process of collaborative innovation between destination stakeholders. This study examines this issue from the perspective of a successful DMO and presents a conceptual framework and new engagement dimensions which address this gap in knowledge.
For many years there has been wide recognition of the economic impact that major sports events can generate in attracting visitors and event-related construction investment. This article seeks to provide a brief overview of the key approaches that have been used to assess the economic impact of major events over the past two decades including multiplier analysis, input-output modelling, and computable general equilibrium (CGE) modelling. The article also discusses some of the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches. In order to provide a platform for future research that draws upon existing research, the article then presents the findings of a meta analysis undertaken to examine the key patterns in economic assessments of major events based on previous studies reported in the literature. These reviews have been classified into three stages that are ordered chronologically and it can be seen that the range of issues covered, the depth of analysis, and the comprehensiveness of the evaluations increased across these three stages. This article finally summarises the key advances in approach that were made across these stages and proposes a future research agenda.
Understanding the social impacts of tourism on communities is extremely important for government at all levels so that action can be taken to reduce the likelihood of a community backlash against tourists and tourism development. Given that the residents of many tourism destinations are a fundamental part of the tourism 'product', resident attitudes and behaviour have a sizable impact on the success or otherwise of a destination. Research on the social impacts of tourism on communities is substantial and ongoing and while advances have been made in the area, the research has not addressed some of the deep seated issues faced by tourist destinations. This paper provides a critique of the social impact of tourism literature, highlighting the inadequacies in the research that has been conducted to date, which then leads to the development of a new conceptual framework. The paper traces the key developments in social impact research and argues that the predominance of quantitative methods potentially limits our ability to gain a more in-depth understanding of the impacts and how they influence both the host community and tourists. The paper finds that the quantitative focus from previous social impact research has led to a narrow understanding of the issues surrounding social impacts and proposes a new research agenda based on 'layers' of social impact understanding through the use of ethnography or phenomenology. The paper concludes with recommendations to progress social impact research beyond simply describing the issues towards explanations of why they occur by suggesting that social impact research examine, in greater depth, the values and intrinsic characteristics of the host residents. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.
This paper examines the key issues associated with work-life balance (WLB) with a particular focus on practices within the tourism industry. It provides an overview of the general literature and then the research that relates specifically to WLB in the tourism industry. It builds on previous research in this area to present an adapted framework for addressing the key variables of WLB that can be tested in subsequent research. © 2009 Palgrave Macmillan.
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the reasons that mega-events rarely realise their potential for host destinations and to suggest issues that need to be addressed in rectifying this issue. Design/methodology/approach: The paper is based on a synthesis of the literature as well as the substantial event-related experience of the authors. Findings: The key reason that mega-events do not generate the expected benefits for the host destination is that event organisers and destination managers adopt a short-term perspective rather than seeing mega-events as part of a long-term strategy for the destination. Even the planned legacies are often not realised as resource constraints in the lead up to the staging of the event often results in resources being shifted away from planning for legacies and being allocated to helping cover the more immediate needs of the event. Research limitations/implications: If the mega-event knowledge portal that is proposed in this paper to help improve the overall contribution that mega-events make to host destinations is developed, it will prove to be a fertile source of data for longitudinal research in the field of mega-events. Originality/value: As so many mega-events fail to deliver the expected benefits for the host destination, this paper provides some useful insights into the key issues that need to be addressed in order to help overcome this problem. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
Different tourism stakeholders mean different things by 'yield' and this presents a barrier to communication and policy discussion. Primarily, this paper provides an overview of different concepts of yield. It also operationalizes several of these measures using inbound tourism expenditure data for Australia so that the origin markets and market segments identified as generating high yields under the various measures can be compared. The paper further identifies the manner in which the concept of yield can be broadened to embrace sustainable yield by incorporating measures of environmental and social impact. It concludes with a discussion of the policy implications of the study.
© 2007 Cognizant Comm. Corp.Thisarticle presents the findings from research undertaken for the United Nations World Tourism Organization that examines the global meetings industry. In particular, the research investigate the type, source, and credibility of data collected on the meetings industry and the potential to use the data for evaluating the economic contribution of the meetings industry. In so doing, the article details the data that are available and presents a method, using the Tourism Satellite Account (TSA), to evaluate the meetings industry on a global basis. The research found that the industry lacked clear definitions and therefore inconsistent data. The article provides suggested definitions and a conceptual framework for use in a TSA evaluation of the meetings industry.
The UK Economic Impact Study (UKEIS), commissioned by the Meeting Professionals International (MPI) Foundation and undertaken by Leeds Metropolitan University, represents a landmark study for the UK meeting industry. It is, to date, the most comprehensive assessment of the economic impact of the industry on the British economy. Although there has been growing recognition that the meeting industry makes a substantial economic contribution, the evidence base to support such a claim has, until now, been fragmented. Several valuable studies have been undertaken in recent years that have incorporated elements of the meeting industry, but their approach to economic modelling and data gathering have varied significantly. The lack of consistency and alignment with international standards has also prevented comparison between the value of the industry in one country and another. More importantly, it has made it difficult for the representatives of the meeting industry to provide evidence of its significance effectively. In order to provide a comprehensive profile of the UK meeting industry and to measure its economic impact robustly, the UKEIS adopted a framework designed by the UN World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) for measuring the sector’s economic importance.3 This framework has been used for similar studies of the meeting industry in the USA, Canada, Mexico, Australia and Denmark. One of its particular strengths is that it connects with official national accounting systems, specifically Tourism Satellite Accounts.