Dr. Ulrike Gretzel

Dr. Ulrike Gretzel is currently a Senior Fellow at the Center of Public Relations, Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California and also serves as the Director of Research at Netnografica, a market research company that extracts insights from online conversations. She received her Ph.D. in Communications from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and holds a master’s degree in International Business from the Vienna University of Economics and Business.

Her research focuses on technology-mediated communication and persuasion in digital media. Her expertise spans the design and evaluation of intelligent systems, as well as the development and implications of artificial intelligence. Her work in tourism has addressed the ways in which tourists engage with each other and with tourism organizations through websites, mobile apps and social media, and has analyzed how tourism experiences are represented and marketed online. She studies social media marketing and destination marketing, influencer marketing and the emerging reputation economy. She has also researched smart tourism development, technology adoption and non-adoption in tourism organizations, tourism in technological dead zones, and the quest for digital detox experiences.

Dr. Gretzel’s research has been funded by the US National Science Foundation, the Australian Research Council, the Hong Kong Research Council, the National Research Foundation of Korea, the US National Endowment for the Humanities, the US National Park Service, Parks Canada, TripAdvisor, the Bush Presidential Library and Museum, and national, regional and local tourism organizations in North America, Europe, Australia and Asia.

She is frequently acknowledged as one of the most cited authors in the fields of tourism and persuasion and her work has been quoted in major news outlets such as the New York Times and The Australian.

Books written and co-edited by Dr. Gretzel include:

Persuasive Recommender Systems: https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9781461447016

Social Media in Travel, Tourism and Hospitality: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315609515

Advances in Social Media for Travel, Tourism and Hospitality: https://www.routledge.com/Advances-in-Social-Media-for-Travel-Tourism-and-Hospitality-New-Perspectives/Sigala-Gretzel/p/book/9780367369163

Handbook of e-Tourism: https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-3-030-05324-6

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