Florian Zach joins hospitality and tourism management faculty
Florian Zach has been appointed assistant professor in the Department of Hospitality and Tourism Management at Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business.
He is one of nine new full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty members at Pamplin this fall. Their addition reflects the college’s commitment to hiring faculty to further strengthen its teaching, research, and business outreach, particularly in areas concerning business analytics, innovation and entrepreneurship, and sustainable global prosperity.
Zach received his Ph.D. in business administration from Temple University in 2009. He earned a master’s degree and a bachelor’s degree at Leopold Franzens University in Innsbruck, Austria.
His research interest is in innovation, specifically in the development of tourism destinations.
His dissertation investigated the development of new services by an American destination marketing organization. His recent work has focused on the impacts of networks, knowledge, and relationships on innovation in tourism destinations, as well as business models in tourism and hospitality.
His work has been published in such top journals as Tourism Management, Annals of Tourism Research, and the Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research.
A co-founder of the Alliance of Innovation and Research in Tourism and Hospitality, Zach most recently served in the Carson College of Business at Washington State University as the Tod and Maxine McClaskey Faculty Fellow.
He has extensive applied knowledge of the hospitality industry through his work as assistant manager of the Hotel Zach, owned and operated by his family in Innsbruck.
