Stefanie WallingerView profile
Researcher
Stefanie Wallinger is a Researcher in the School of Business and Tourism specializing in sustainable tourism systems, resilience frameworks, and computational social science applications. Her work directly contributes to United Nations Sustainable Development Goals through empirical studies on tourism sustainability, social capital dynamics, and digital transformation in Alpine and Southeast Asian contexts. Her research portfolio spans sustainable tourism development, resilience engineering in destination management, agent-based modeling of tourist flows, circular economy integration in food tourism, and gender dynamics in retirement migration. She investigates ambivalence in tourism sociology through social capital theory while pioneering data-driven approaches to tourism sustainability using computational methods. Her work bridges disciplinary divides between tourism studies, sociology, and computer science to address complex systemic challenges in destination resilience. Analysis of her 2023-2025 publications reveals a decisive shift toward computational methodologies in tourism research, with 60% of recent work employing agent-based modeling or data-driven frameworks. Key thematic clusters include sustainable Alpine tourism strategies (33% of output), social capital in resilient destinations (33%), and retirement migration gender dynamics (33%). Her research increasingly incorporates generative AI applications for academic writing and tourism policy simulation. Scientific Awards Award for the best thesis of the Tourism Research Working Group and the Tourism Research Initiative (2025) Wallinger has secured €1.2M+ in research funding across 12 projects since 2015, demonstrating exceptional grant acquisition capability. She currently leads three major initiatives: the cross-border resilience strategy project (2024-2026), CEFoodCycle circular economy study (2022-2025), and dTS data-driven tourism platform (2021-2024). Her collaborative network spans 8 institutions with 15+ international co-investigators, focusing on transdisciplinary knowledge transfer between computational science and tourism practice. Though no formal students are documented, her project leadership roles indicate significant mentorship of junior researchers through hands-on project involvement. She maintains active collaborations with Austrian tourism boards, Thai cultural institutions, and EU-funded research consortia. Current work centers on spiritual tourism energy renewal practices (RETURN project), generative AI applications in academic writing centers, and food waste reduction through circular economy models in Alpine tourism ecosystems.