Demet Tüzünkan was born in İstanbul in 1982. After getting her Bachelor’s degree from Anadolu University Tourism and Hotel Management Department in 2004, she received her MBA from Hacettepe University in 2007. In 2010, after working in managerial positions at Tourism industry, she was hired by Beykent University as a Research Assistant and started her academic career as a Ph.D. student in Labour Economics and Industrial Relations department in Istanbul University at the same year. During her Ph.D., she received a scholarship from The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey and studied at University of Bologna, Economics Department as a Visiting Researcher from March 2014 to September 2014. After completing her PhD in March 2015, with the thesis of “A Research of Employment Policies in Turkish Tourism Industry in the Terms of Decent Work Concept”, she started working as an Assistant Professor in Beykent University. Between 2016-2018 she served at Woosong University, Hotel Management Department in South Korea as an Assistant Professor. Now, she is working at Okan University, Istanbul, in Tourism and Hotel Management Department (English) as the Head of Department. Her interested areas are tourism, human resources, innovation, smart tourism, decent work and social politics. Her foreign languages are English, German and basic Italian.
Volkan Altintas is an associate professor at the Faculty of Tourism at İzmir Katip Çelebi University (İzmir, Turkey). He received his Master’s and Ph.D degree from Adeniz University with a mojor in tourism and hotel management. His research areas are local people, tourism management, tour guiding tourism planning.