Dr. Larissa Neuburger graduated on Spring 2021 with her PhD in the Department of Tourism, Hospitality and Event Management at UF. Her research interests include e-tourism, immersive technologies and tourist experience.
Nationality: Salzburg, Austria
Past experience: BS in Tourism, MA in Tourism and MA in Business Administration. Work experience in DMOs, hotels, academic administration, marketing and events.
Favorite UF experience: Being involved with different people from distinct backgrounds and countries, and areas of study. She also loves to meet people in the conferences she goes.
Most valuable learning from EFTI: Getting involved in industry-related projects, meeting the Advisory Board, being part or events and classes inside and outside the department, and learning methods and tools for research.
Favorite travel experience: Spending two weeks in India in which she could be involved with locals and attend an Indian wedding. She also loved going to Peru and Australia while in the PhD program.
Dream place to visit: Vietnam, Brasil and Argentina
Hobbies: Scuba Diving. She started with her Dad and has been to Egypt, Croatia and Spain. She hopes to dive more in Florida.
Fun Fact: She is from the city of “The Sound of Music” but had never watched the movie before coming to the US. The first time she watched it was on her first celebrated Thanksgiving, with the American part of her family, and it is now one of her favorite movies!
More about Larissa...
She teaches a course about Event Promotion for undergraduate students, in which she successfully brings great academic and industry experience to contribute to interactive lectures. She holds a Master in Innovation and Management in Tourism and a Master in Business Administration, Management and Operations from the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences (Austria). Larissa has industry experience primarily in marketing for hotels, DMO’s and academic institutions. Right before coming to the U.S. to pursue her PhD, she held the position of Marketing Manager for Österreichischer Wirtschaftsverlag – Austria’s largest B2B publishing house based in Vienna. While supporting the event planning team, she was primarily responsible for marketing and promotion of congresses and conferences for different industries.
As an academic, her research interests include e-tourism, immersive technologies and tourist experience. In particular, her research examines the impact of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) as a support tool for the interpretation of museums and historic sites in the context of heritage tourism.
Larissa worked on several projects where she applied technologies in her research. Most notably, she led a project that used Augmented Reality as a tool for the Museum for Contemporary History, Ebensee (Austria). The museum exhibits information and education about the demolished concentration camp in the respective town. The research project aimed to support the museum and use Augmented Reality to enhance visitors’ experience and understanding of this sensitive historical topic. This project triggered her interest in exploring further research, where she examined the impact of Augmented Reality on visitors’ experience in the Domquartier, a Cathedral museum in Salzburg. In her research project, she developed an Augmented Reality prototype for the museum, allowing visitors to digitally interact with inaccessible and fragile artifacts, which proved to be a great asset to the visitors’ experience and the museum itself. Her main goal is to enhance attractions, tourism sites and museums, and to provide an interactive and interesting learning experience for visitors. Especially in the context of complex and sensitive topics, she believes having technology as a mediator makes visitors more interested and improves their understanding and reflection about these topics. Currently she is working on her dissertation, which focuses on the use of Augmented Reality as a tool to re-interpret historic sites in the context of slavery tourism in the South of the U.S.
Many of her projects are performed in collaborations with industry partners and organizations within the tourism industry. One of Larissa’s main research goals is to make tourism sites benefit from the opportunity of providing better experiences to their visitors, implement technologies as an added value of their exhibitions and use them as a powerful marketing tool. She believes in the importance of research being accessible and taken out of the academia to be applied in “real world scenarios”, specifically in an interactive and interdisciplinary industry such as tourism. To assure better results in this interdisciplinarity, she nurtures relationships and collaborations with other departments at UF such as History, Anthropology and Archeology, and facilitates joint efforts from other universities with the goal of sharing experiences and increasing knowledge.
In addition, Larissa explores other research topics in the eTourism context. Her most recent project is in collaboration with her colleague, Dr. Danielle Barbe. The study examines Influencer Marketing on Social Media and its impact on travel behavior and tourism perception. Other areas of interest include the use of Data Mining to analyze online UGC (user-generated-content) to better understand how visitors experience tourism attractions.
