Dr Shahab Pourfakhimi | UniSC | University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia

Dr Shahab Pourfakhimi is a tourism consumer behaviour researcher, and has been working in the School of Business and Creative Industries as a lecturer, Tourism, Leisure and Event Management since March, 2017. Shahab is based at our Fraser Coast campus.

Shahab is the social media editor of the Journal of Sustainable Tourism. Before joining USC, Shahab taught various tourism, marketing, hospitality and events courses at the University of Otago and Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. He has also worked in several research and industrial projects in New Zealand, Malaysia and Iran. He is currently leading a number of innovative Tourism and consumer research projects collaborating with scholars from New Zealand, Australia, China, Iran and Malaysia.

Shahab’s research interests generally involve studying consumer behaviour in tourism, hospitality and events. He is particularly interested in investigating the socio-psychological dimensions of tourists’ perceptions, choices and experiences. In his doctoral thesis, he investigated consumers’ hotel selection behaviour with a focus on the impact of electronic word of mouth on their hotel choice. His more recent projects included a series of empirical and conceptual investigations of the adoption and impacts of smart, social and mobile information and communication technologies in tourism, hospitality and events. His current projects mainly involve exploring the cognitive and affective dimensions of consumers’ choices and experiences in tourism, hospitality and events and studying the impact of such experiences on their wellbeing and quality of life.