Biography
Since 2005, Dr Alexis Papathanassis has been Professor for Cruise Management and e-Tourism at the Bremerhaven University of Applied Sciences. Alexis is Dean for the Faculty of Management and Information Systems, Co-Director of the Institute for Maritime Tourism and Chairman of the Cruise Research Society. He is also visiting Professor at the Bremen University of Applied Sciences and the Russian Academy of Foreign Trade, and a member of the German Tourism Research Society. Alexis’ publication activity mainly focuses on the cruise sector and comprises over 100 contributions to textbooks, peer-reviewed scientific journals and conferences. He also acts as an academic reviewer for high-ranked tourism journals, including: Annals of Tourism Research, Tourism Management, Tourism Review, and the International Journal of Tourism Research. He also received the Emerald Literati Award for his paper: Papathanassis, A. (2017). Cruise Tourism Management: State of the Art. Tourism Review, 72(1): 104-119.
Besides being an advisory partner for Deloitte Consulting (Germany), he regularly acts as an independent consultant to numerous tour operators and cruise companies, working on numerous M&A and business development projects. Over the last years, Alexis has also participated in various national and international publicly-funded projects, aimed at cruise tourism development. Prior to joining fulltime academia, Alexis pursued a career at TUI, Europe’s leading tourism group. Joining the group as a management trainee in 1999, Alexis was appointed project manager & process engineer in 2001. In 2003, he became a business unit manager at TUI Contracting AG and was accountable for the company’s business interfaces and operations support areas.
Alexis graduated with a degree in Business Administration at the University of Bath in 1996. He gained his MSc in Analysis, Design and Management of Information Systems with distinction from the London School of Economics & Political Science in 1997. Following a military service in Greece and parallel to his professional career, Alexis successfully completed his PhD in Economic Sciences at the Leibniz University (Hanover) in Germany. His doctoral thesis focused on the post-merger management of information and communication technologies within the tourism sector. The corresponding doctoral dissertation was published by the Deutsche Universitätsverlag (DUV). In 2016, he was awarded a honorary PhD by the University of Ovidius (Romania) for his contribution to the cruise tourism research.