David Beirman

David Beirman is a senior lecturer in Tourism at UTS. He completed undergraduate and postgraduate degrees majoring in Sociology at the University of NSW.

David has had an extensive career in the Australian travel industry between 1981-2009 which has encompassed work with retail travel agencies, wholesale tour operators, destination marketing and management, human resource management and in-service industry training.

Prior to joining UTS as a full-time lecturer in November 2009, David had developed tourism courses and lectured part-time at UTS and other universities in tourism, marketing, Middle East studies and sociology.

His specialist areas of research are tourism risk, crisis and recovery management and destination marketing. He has been widely published in these fields. He has been invited as a keynote speaker in conferences all over the world and has provided crisis and recovery management consultation to governments and tourism businesses in Australia, Asia, Africa and North America.

From 2000-2012 he was the founder and National Secretary of the Eastern Mediterranean Tourism Association, an industry association which promoted fifteen countries between Italy and Jordan. David is the longest serving and only foundation member of the Consular Consultative Group which is a travel industry, inter-governmental and business leadership body appointed by Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to consult with DFAT on the issue of government travel advisories and tourism safety.

In 2011 he became involved as a member of the Pacific Asia Travel Association Rapid Response Taskforce which is PATA's tourism crisis management unit. He is the co-author of PATA's toursm risk, crisis and receovery manaual which is used in 66 countries. In 2011 and 2012 he cooperated with the Australian Emergency Management Institute to co-organise two UN World Tourism Organisation Conferences which focussed on the Integration of Tourism and Emergency Management. He has been the co-chair since 2012 of CAUTHE's (Council of Australasian Tourism and Hospitality Educators) Tourism Risk, Crisis and recovery Special Interest Group which by 2021 has 70 academic members.

In 2015 David was a member of the Pacific Asia Travel Association's Nepal Rapid Recovery Task force which developed , in association with Nepal's tourism leadership a tourism recovery strategy for Nepal following the April 2015 earthquake. He also ran a tourism recovery workshop in Nepal for Nepal's tourism leaders. In 2016 he wrote risk crisis and recovery manuals for the Council of Australian Tour Operators and for Local tourist and event businesses in Eastern Sydney under the auspicies of Randwick Council City Tourism.

In May 2017 David was invited to be a speaker at the APEC Counter terrorism and tourism resilience workshop held in Bali . This conference has helped to shape the counter-terrorism approach towards tourism of all 21 APEC economies. In June 2017 he was a keynote speaker at the Thai national tourism Forum held in Chiang Mai. In October 2017 he was a major speaker at the inaugural Pacific Insights Tourism Conference held in Port Vila, Vanuatu for the tourism leadership of 17 Pacific island states jointly organized by the Pacific Asia Travel Association and the South Pacific Tourism Organization. In 2018 he was appointed as an honorary board member of the Australian Travel Careers Council

David teaches two subjects at UTS which focus on risk management- one focussed on tourism and one called Managing Risk and Opportunity which encompasses all business.In October 2021 his latest book, Tourism Crises and Destination Recovery (Sage Publications) was released globally.