Biography

Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Alexis Papathanassis has held the Chair of Cruise Management and e-Tourism at Hochschule Bremerhaven (University of Applied Sciences) since 2005. Before his appointment as Rector, he served as Dean of the Faculty of Management and Information Systems, Co-Director of the Institute for Maritime Tourism, and Chairman of the Cruise Research Society.

His publication record comprises over 120 contributions to textbooks, peer-reviewed journals, and international conferences. He serves as a reviewer for leading tourism journals, among them Annals of Tourism Research, Tourism Management, Tourism Review, and the International Journal of Tourism Research, having completed over 213 reviews to date. His research output has been downloaded more than 188,000 times.

His 2011 paper on the adoption of online holiday reviews (published in Tourism Management) was named among the journal’s most-cited articles in 2016, and his 2017 article “Cruise Tourism Management: State of the Art” (Tourism Review) received the Emerald Literati Award.

Alongside his academic work, Alexis serves as an advisory partner to Deloitte Consulting (Germany) and provides independent consultancy to cruise operators, tour operators, and port authorities on M&A and business development projects. He has led several nationally and internationally funded initiatives on cruise tourism development, including the European TEMPUS programme for the Black Sea Region.

Raised on the island of Rhodes (Greece) in a family of tourism entrepreneurs, Alexis holds a BA in Business Administration from the University of Bath (1996), an MSc with distinction in Analysis, Design and Management of Information Systems from the London School of Economics (1997), and a PhD in Economic Sciences from Leibniz University Hanover. In 2016, the University of Ovidius (Romania) awarded him an honorary doctorate in recognition of his contributions to cruise tourism research.