About Ross Dowling

Ross Dowling is Foundation Professor of Tourism in the School of Marketing, Tourism and Leisure, Faculty of Business and Law, at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia. Internationally he is an Advisor, UNESCO Global Network of National Geoparks (HQ France), Executive Board Member of the Indian Ocean Tourism Organization (Oman), Co-founder, International Cruise Research Society (Germany) and a Life Member of the Outward Bound Trust (New Zealand). In Australia he is Co-founder and Executive Director of Ecotourism Australia as well as an Advisor to Cruise Down Under. In Western Australia he is Chair of the Forum Advocating Cultural and Eco Tourism (FACET) as well as a Council
Member of the Royal Automobile Club and the Minister of Tourism’s appointee to the Council of the National Trust. He is a Life Member of the Australian Association of Environmental Education (WA). Professor Dowling conducts international research in the fields of geotourism, cruise ship tourism and ecotourism with over 200 publications. In recent years he has co-authored or co-edited nine books on tourism. They are Ecotourism, Tourism in Destination Communities, Natural Area Tourism, Ecotourism Policy and Planning, Wildlife Tourism, Geotourism, Cruise Ship Tourism, Coastal Tourism Development and Geotourism: the Tourism of Geology and Landscape. Two have been translated into Chinese, one into Persian and others published in India. In 2008 he convened the Inaugural Global Geotourism Conference in Australia and was Advisor to the Sarawak Tourism Board for the Second Global Geotourism Conference held in Mulu, Malaysian Borneo in 2010.