“Compleat Scholar” bridging tourism, academia and industry
For two decades, Professor Robert Li’s rigorous, yet practice-grounded research has bridged academia and the hospitality and tourism industry, giving it a new lens for examining its conventional wisdom. Since joining CUHK in January 2025, he has brought what he calls the “compleat scholar” approach to the School, a philosophy that integrates cross-disciplinary academic enquiry with real-world impact.
The questions that wouldn’t wait
Now the Fung King Hey Memorial Professor of Tourism Management, Professor Li’s career did not begin in academia. It started at the Nanjing Municipal Tourism Bureau, where he worked as a destination marketing specialist who handled tourism planning, event management, promotion and TV travel videos.
“I was ‘selling’ something I couldn’t fully define,” he recalls. “What exactly is my city’s image? How do different campaigns and the media shape and maintain that image? How does that image then influence information search behaviour? Why do some messages stick while others disappear?”
These questions piqued Professor Li’s curiosity. His encounter with academic work on “destination image” – what people think and feel about a place – sparked his decision to pursue his postgraduate studies in the United States and tackle these questions more systematically.
Building programmes, not just papers
Early in his academic journey, Professor Li noticed that practitioners and academics often work in parallel universes. Academics chase theoretically “interesting” questions while practitioners chase KPIs. He resolved to build a career that would bridge these two worlds.
Professor Li developed “research programmes”. Unlike individual studies that answer discrete questions, these are long-term thematic investigations composed of multiple interlinked projects that evolve over a span of years. Through sustained cross-disciplinary collaboration, these programmes create frameworks, tools and evidence that academics and practitioners can apply and refine over time.
“This approach fits my personality most naturally,” says Professor Li. “It allows me to pursue multiple interests while building sustained expertise.”
He now runs several such programmes in parallel, each one combining conceptual work, methodological innovation and empirical studies. The programmes also draw collaborators from various fields, including computer science, psychology, linguistics, public health and the tourism industry itself.
The research they generate doesn’t just generate papers; it reshapes practice. Professor Li’s tourism and well-being research has given employers and tourism boards the language and data to address unhealthy workplace norms regarding vacation time. Other ongoing studies explore travel as a form of “lifestyle medicine”, including projects on depression, loneliness among seniors and even dementia-friendly tourism.
Bridging linguistic and cultural divides
Professor Li makes it a point to ensure that his research findings do not remain trapped in Western journals that are inaccessible to non-English-speaking academics and practitioners. “I consider it important to be academic – to be true to who we are,” he explains. “At the same time, we need to care about what the industry needs and stay bilingual. We should speak both a rigorous academic language and plain language to inform industry, media, government, and the wider community.”
Living this philosophy, he led the creation of a WeChat platform that transformed top-tier tourism journal articles into short, accessible stories for Chinese tourism scholars and professionals. Complex findings became digestible insights for people who would happily read a well-told story on their phones, but who might never flip through a scholarly research journal.
Such efforts reflect Professor Li’s commitment to being what he calls a “compleat scholar”, a concept, in his words, describing academics who intentionally develop multiple facets of their careers as an integrated whole. For him, this has defined his trajectory and involves different roles within academia (researcher, educator, centre director, journal editor, association leader, and now school director). At the same time, he has not abandoned his original research passion or his roots in practice.
Members of the School of Hotel and Tourism Management congratulate Professor Li on his inauguration as the Fung King Hey Memorial Professor of Tourism Management
Connecting East and West
Among the bridges Professor Li builds, the most important one links East and West. “After spending 23 years in the United States, I decided to return to Asia to apply global tourism insights in an Asian context and foster a deeper dialogue between international research and regional practice.”
He joined CUHK Business School because he believes the positioning of tourism and hospitality within a business school offers a distinctive advantage. It is more intellectually demanding than operations-focused hospitality programmes, yet more closely connected to the industry than many traditional business disciplines.
“As tourism, hospitality, retail, culture, sports, entertainment, and even healthcare increasingly converge around the world, the key question for the industry has shifted to how to create experiences people care about,” Professor Li explains. “Tourism and hospitality are best understood as a context where core business concepts converge, rather than as a narrow vocational track. That means we design what I call ‘gen business’ subjects. These are general business courses that are packaged and tailored to specific contexts, such as the experience economy.”
Hospitality as mindset
The MSc in Leadership for Experience Economy, which SHTM proposed in 2025 and set to launch this year, embodies this vision. The programme trains professionals who practices “hospitality thinking” – a mindset he considers essential for the converging experience economy. “The idea of hospitality thinking basically means how open and receptive we are to strangers, which influences how we design and deliver something meaningful that resonates with them.”
Within three months, the programme drew over 1,000 applications, a validation of strong demand. In the age of AI, Professor Li hopes to cultivate future talents who have the ability to design meaningful experiences across industries, cultures and contexts, while serving as bridges between Asian and international perspectives.
These capabilities will become increasingly vital as China shapes the future of global tourism and hospitality, and Hong Kong is uniquely positioned between East and West to cultivate them.