The Sustainable Tourism Lab was founded in 2021 by lab director, Todd Montgomery, with funding support from Visit Bend.
The Lab provides data and services to help tourism organizations around the country balance visitor and community needs. It aims to adopt a multidisciplinary approach to pursue sustainable solutions to common tourism industry problems.
To improve the tourism industry through a collaborative, stakeholder-driven process, the lab works to research and design sustainable solutions to the industry’s most pressing problems.
Community Sentiment of Tourism
OSU researchers, along with partner institutions from across the US, Asia/Pacific, and Central America are quantifying how local residents perceive tourism.
Food Waste Technology
Business, Engineering and Computer Science faculty and students have built a prototype to quantify and reduce post-consumer food waste.
Building A Sustainable Workforce
There are jobs that will always have low retention rates and that technology is not currently available to automate. For those jobs, the answer is rapid, cost-effective and impactful retraining.