Sun Yat-sen University | China
Limin Xiao is a dedicated and emerging scholar in tourism management, currently serving as a visiting Ph.D. student funded by the prestigious China Scholarship Council (CSC). She is pursuing her doctoral studies at the School of Business, Sun Yat-sen University—one of China’s leading institutions under Project 985—where she specializes in tourism management with a focus on transformative experiences and AI service applications in tourism. Born in Wuhan in December 1999, Limin has built a strong interdisciplinary academic foundation that integrates business administration, English studies, and tourism research. She completed her dual bachelor’s degrees in English and Business Administration at the School of Foreign Languages, China University of Geosciences (Project 211), where she ranked first in her school with a GPA of 4.13/5.0 and earned direct admission to postgraduate study. Limin’s research trajectory is marked by a deep interest in how tourists experience transformation, particularly within cultural, wellness, and digitally empowered tourism contexts. She has contributed to several high-quality publications, including an accepted paper in Tourism Management Perspectives and ongoing submissions to Tourism Tribune and the International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management. Her early research in translation studies has also appeared in Overseas English. Limin has presented her work at major academic conferences such as MTCON’23 in Istanbul, APMA 2023 in Guangzhou, the China Marketing Science Conference, and the China Tourism Research Annual Conference. Her scholarship demonstrates a robust theoretical grounding, drawing from self-expansion theory, liminality, embodiment cognition, and narrative persuasion models. She is simultaneously advancing multiple working papers that examine topics such as cultural tourism employees’ self-expansion, immersive digital-empowered tourism, and AI-driven storytelling for cultural identity formation. Her academic excellence has been consistently recognized through numerous national and international awards, including the highly competitive National Scholarship (top 0.2%), Meritorious Winner in the Mathematical Contest in Modeling (top 8%), first prizes in multiple national English competitions, and a professional qualification in translation (CATTI Level 3). She has also received honors for research innovation and academic presentation, including the Outstanding Final Report Award from the Ministry of Education and the Outstanding Paper Award at the 2024 Annual Forum on Frontiers of Tourism Research. With strong analytical skills, interdisciplinary training, and growing expertise in transformative tourism and AI-enabled visitor engagement, Limin Xiao represents a promising young researcher contributing innovative insights to the global tourism scholarship community.
Featured Publications
Han, X., Zheng, Y., Wu, J. (Snow), & Xiao, L. (2025). Transformative value in cultural tourism: Scale development and its impact on tourist eudaimonic well-being. Tourism Management Perspectives. (Accepted February 2025)
Han, X., Zheng, Y., & Xiao, L. (n.d.). The effect of tourists’ initiative in wellness tourism on perceived transformation: From a perspective of transformative tourism. Tourism Tribune. (Second round of review)
Han, X., Liu, H., Xiao, L., & Zheng, Y. (n.d.). More innovative, more popular? The effect of amenity innovation on customers’ booking intentions in P2P accommodation. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management. (Awaiting review)
Xiao, L. (2020). The translation of tourist attraction descriptions from the perspective of eco-translatology: A case study of the Hubei Provincial Museum. Overseas English, 2020(6), 65–66.