Karen Tan

A Singapore native, Karen has close to ten years of professional experience in hospitality and tourism consulting. With a primary focus on the Asia Pacific region, her wealth of consulting experience spans the entire lifecycle of tourism and hospitality assets, including pre-development market and financial feasibility analysis, budget reviews as well as asset disposal and brokerage. In addition, she has extensive experience in strategic consulting projects, providing advice to clients on tourism destination master planning and portfolio restructuring. She has also advised several Nasdaq-listed hotel companies on their country-specific market entry strategies.

Karen’s main research interest lie in understanding the role of negative emotions in tourism and hospitality. This began with her study of the vacation guilt phenomenon and its root causes among employees in the United States. This study, which is published in Journal of Travel Research, was one of three “Best Research Paper” finalists at the 2019 Tourism Travel and Research Association (TTRA) conference in Melbourne, Australia. In addition to investigating how negative emotions impact tourist behavior, she is also interested in quantifying the financial impacts of such emotions on hospitality and tourism businesses. Moreover, by leveraging her extensive professional experiences, she is extending her research on negative emotions into tourist behavior and tourism/hospitality development.