Researcher biography

Professor Ritchie's research interests are associated with tourism risk management. His research has focused on understanding risk from an individual and organisational perspective. His work on organisations explores risk attitudes and response strategies to effectively respond and recover from crises and disasters. He also explores tourist attitudes to risk and their risk reduction behaviour, including beach goers, Australian outbound travellers and potential travellers to the Middle East and in Indonesia. His research projects also examine the factors that influence the formation of risk attitudes and behaviour by using social and organisational psychology theory and concepts. Recently his interests have expanded to include carbon offsetting to understand consumer preferences and adoption of carbon offseting in an aviation context. He currently holds an ARC Discovery Grant and an ARC Linkage grant on this topic area. He has given keynote speeches at over ten international conferences and has supervised 15 PhD students to completion. Brent is currently unable to advise any PhD students.

Professor Ritchie has coordinated several research projects including Sustainable Tourism CRC and consultancy work for a number of tourism organisations in the public and private sector in Australia, England, Vietnam and New Zealand. He has also published extensively in academic journals including Tourism Management, Journal of Travel Research, Annals of Tourism Research, Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing and Current Issues in Tourism. He was former editor of the Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management and is on the editorial board of eight international journals including the Journal of Travel Research. Professor Ritchie is also a Distinguished Professor and member of the Center for Tourism Research at Wakayama University, Japan and an Affiliate of the Tourism Crisis Management Instiute at the University of Florida, USA.

Professor Ritchie joined the School of Tourism in June 2008, having previously worked as the head of the tourism discipline and the research area at the University of Canberra. Professor Ritchie has also previously worked at the School of Service Management at the University of Brighton UK. He has a PhD from the University of Otago, New Zealand graduating in 2000