Maria Lexhagen, researcher

My interest in tourism and tourism research is based on more than ten years of working in the hotel and restaurant trade. After completing my bachelors degree in Business Administration at the Department of Tourism Studies at Mid Sweden University in Östersund, I started working at ETOUR in 1997.

At ETOUR I have been involved in both the administration of the institute, as well as conducting investigations into different issues, which are of concern to the practitioners in the tourism industry, within the department of knowledge transfer. Since 2002 I am pursuing a PhD project involving a number of different studies.

Research interests

 I was a PhD student at Gothenburg University School of Economics and Commercial Law and my research interests is the use of information technology in the tourism industry. My research interests have developed from being focused on understanding how and why tourism businesses use IT, to an interest in how their use of IT is perceived by the customers. Mainly my focus is on perceived value and utility of different kinds of IT services used by tourism businesses.