I got the idea about starting this blog when I was building a website for Villipihlaja experience and activity service provider—website design is something I also do now and then. I started wondering, if I would like to write something more creative about travel and tourism as I am working with tourism research every day at TAK Research. But I guess that the research background will always be visible on my texts: but at least I can imagine of writing creative texts.
On this blog, I will examine different tourism services at my home town, in Finland and perhaps outside Finland as well. Only time will show what kind of texts there will be, but I will begin with activities and thing that I like myself. I guess there will also be articles about my PhD research as well.
My background
I got interested about tourism and travel when I began to work aboard s/s Tarjanne as a first mate in 2001. Tarjanne is a steamer sailing the same route it has sailed since 1908 between Tampere and Virrat. After working there I found myself studying tourism in the University of Joensuu (now UEF). My major subject at the University of Tampere was history and the tourism studies were really useful in understanding the phenomenon of tourism more profoundly. At the same time I began to get interested in tourism sector as a potential place for finding a “real job”. (Even though I always say that my real job is the one as a steamboat captain and chief engineer and I just do something else for living in the wintertime…)
I wrote my Master’s thesis (in Finnish only) about steamboat traffic on lake Näsijärvi 1918–1939. In that piece, I managed to combine the two very important issues to me: steamboats and tourism. After graduation, I found myself working at the Research and Education Centre Synergos with several tourism research projects. One short project led to another and so on. This period lasted for eight years (2008–16) after which I started to work with my PhD project about InterRail in the 1970s and 1980s. I worked as a full-time PhD researcher for one year and I got recruited to TAK research at the same time (2016). At the moment (2019) I am still working at TAK and my research work there consists mainly about tourism economic impacts, foreign tourists in Finland and tourism stats. I am also trying to write my PhD thesis at the same time and in the summertime you can find me aboard different Finnish steamboats.
So I am familiar with tourism as a (applied) research but this blogging thing is totally new for me. Let’s see what happens!