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Originally founded in 1980 at Hangzhou University, The Institute of Tourism Management (TITM) is the first university-level tourism research institute in China. TITM covers a wide range of research interests such as tourism economics, tourism planning, tourism resource management, sustainable tourism development, tourism enterprise management, tourism policies, tourism sociology, and tourism psychology. TITM is particularly strong in conducting tourism resource analysis, tourism marketing research, tourism project planning, tourist area planning, urban planning and structural design, traffic and landscape planning, tourist attraction operation and management. Recently, TITM has extended its research areas by cooperating with various disciplines including literary archaeology, art, communication, computer science and others. And this multi-disciplinary cooperation helps create a new research field of cultural tourism innovation, which focuses on studying the digital inheritance of cultural heritage and smart tourism as well as exploring its real-world application

TITM is highly productive as its members have published more than 200 journal articles in top international tourism journals such as Annals of Tourism Research, Tourism Management, Journal of Travel Research and 30 academic books, and received over 20 national and regional research grants. TITM has received six provincial awards in recent ten years. In terms of program and project collaboration, TITM has over 30 global university partners including The University of Queensland, Australia, Cornell University, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Texas A&M University, PennState University, Purdue University, James Cook University, University of Central Florida, Surrey University, and etc. . TITM also has a very close tie with tourism industry: it has set up strategic alliance with some influential tourism and tourism-related enterprises such as Alibaba (Fliggy), Tencent, and SUNAC. TITM is also highly active in taking social service that connects the industry with academia. By far, it has completed more than 400 consulting projects that promote regional tourism development at national, provincial, and municipal levels. TITM members have been sent to poor counties and cities in the western China to provide professional consultancy support and training services for the sake of promoting local tourism development.