Founts of knowledge or delusions of grandeur? Limits and illusions of tourism research impact: A reply to Wood

The starting point of our paper (Thomas & Ormerod, 2017) was to assess the extent to which academic research influenced policy and practice. Others have undertaken this task and come to a broadly similar conclusion; collectively, tourism researchers appear to have little impact on anyone other than fellow academics (and perhaps their students). Whether this is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, important or unimportant, depends on your perspective. In addition to illustrating the novel use of digital methods, the main contribution of our research lay in its attempt to explain why some academic researchers appear to have more non-academic impact than others. Our theorising of impact was, therefore, designed to identify variables that influenced impact and to show their inter-relationships. Readers will reach their own conclusions about the extent to which we were successful in our ambition, but few will deny that we had a very comprehensive data set to work with, albeit limited to the UK.