Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Georg Arlt FRGS FRAS (born in West-Berlin, married to Swiss wife) is the director of the Meaningful Tourism Centre Ltd. a non-profit organisation based in London and Kathmandu, which includes the COTRI China Outbound Tourism Institute and the MTG Meaningful Tourism Group.
He has been working with China since 50 years, starting as a student of Sinology at FU Berlin. He visited Hong Kong and Taiwan in 1977 and spend three weeks in Mainland China for the first time in Spring 1978, half a year before the People’s Republic of China started the Reform and Opening policy. He holds a M.A. in Sinology, Sociology and Political Sciences and a PhD rer.pol. from FU Berlin.
Prof. Dr. Arlt started working with the Chinese tourism market in 1986, organising until 1989 German tourism groups to China in the fields of medicine, literature and culture. From 1991 he organised mostly business delegations from China to Europe in the fields of mobility, infrastructure, energy and education. Starting in 2002, he served for 18 years as a Professor for International Tourism Management at German universities and as Visiting Professor at universities in China, UK, Australia and New Zealand. He is widely considered as one of the leading experts for China’s outbound tourism and regularly quoted in CNN, BBC, WSJ, FT, The Economist, China Daily, South China Morning Post etc.
In 2006 he published the first monograph about the topic named China’s Outbound Tourism with Routledge, a new book The Return of Chinese Tourists will be published by Routledge in 2025.
Prof. Dr. Arlt is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Asiatic Society, the International Association of China Tourism Studies (Guangzhou) and the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (Tokyo) and holds positions in several international organisations, including UN Tourism (Madrid), WTTC World Tourism and Travel Council (London), ETC European Tourism Commission (Brussels), WTCF World Tourism Cities Federation (Beijing), PATA Pacific Asia Travel Association (Bangkok), and others. He is also a Vice President of the EU-China Commission for Culture and Tourism and the Regional Vice President of ITSA International Tourism Studies Association for South Asia and Nepal.
Since 2021 Prof. Dr. Arlt has developed the Meaningful Tourism paradigm as a holistic tool for the sustainable development of global tourism. Working in cooperation with Prof. Harold Goodwin he was one of the first signatories of the New Magna Charta of Responsible Tourism and has also signed the Glasgow Declaration.
In 2024 he moved to Nepal and united COTRI and MTG under the umbrella of the Meaningful Tourism Centre Ltd., a non-profit organisation based in London and Kathmandu lead by Prof. Arlt.
He has supported public and private institutions and companies on all continents between 1992 and 2024, working in 88 countries as consultant, trainer, organiser of conferences and workshops, etc., acting as Keynote Speaker or Chair in more than 100 international conferences.
Projects included also cooperation with Development aid organisations like GIZ, ITC and others and has participated in several EU Projects including the EU-China Tourism Year 2018 and the EU Project on Erasmus+ in Tourism. Prof. Dr. Arlt was involved in Community-based Tourism research and strategy projects in Ganzi (Western Sichuan, above 4,000 m), Albania and Tunisia and in Sustainable tourism research in Japan, China, Nepal and other countries.
He has also acted as a jury member for the accreditation of tourism and hospitality academic programs for several universities in Europe and Asia and is regularly working as external examiner for articles submitted for publication for major academic tourism journals. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Tourism Planning & Development Journal and the International Journal of Tourism Research.
In Nepal he conducted between 2015 and 2024 several workshops for the Chinese source market and for Meaningful Tourism development. He is NICE Goodwill Ambassador and Special Advisor (China) for the PATA Nepal Chapter. He is also the freelance correspondent for tourism development in Nepal for fvw, HospitalityInside, Arabian Travel and Tourism News, Chinahirn and TTG Asia.
He is the organiser since 2004 and 2021 respectively of the annual Chinese Tourist Welcome Award and the annual Meaningful Tourism Award.
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