Dr Crispian Tarrant is a highly experienced customer insight professional with a well-established reputation for pinpointing the business implications of research findings. An advocate of evidence-based decision-making, he provides advice that is sought at CEO and Board level by many leading organisations, especially those operating in travel, hotels and hospitality.
Cris founded BDRC, a specialist market research consultancy, in 1991 and the firm has grown to become a highly respected insights provider with a deep level of specialisation in several service industry verticals.
Since 2018 the business has been part of the Paris-based BVA Group, a worldwide top 20 research group, which has over 700 staff across more than a dozen global offices.
The BVA-BDRC hotels and hospitality practice produces the Hotel Guest Survey, regarded as the industry bible for the monitoring of hotel brand perceptions in multiple global markets, the Venue Verdict suite of operational performance tools for the MICE sector, and Brand Margin® the unique methodology for determining the perceived added value that a hotel brand delivers.
Consumer demand – or expectation – is one of the key drivers of the ESG agenda. Cris and his team are actively engaged in understanding the nature of this demand in the travel sector, how the market segments and how consumer behaviours can be ‘nudged’ to achieve better ESG outcomes.
Cris qualified as a social scientist, with a BSc from Durham University and a PhD from Manchester University. He is a Fellow of the UK Market Research Society and twice a winner of MRS national awards for research effectiveness. He is also a Fellow of the UK Tourism Society and the UK Institute of Directors.
An accomplished speaker and panel chairman, Cris has spoken at international conferences in Europe, USA, Asia, Middle East and Africa and he has lectured on service performance measurement at the Warwick University MBA course and been an invited speaker at the School of Hotel Management at Oxford Brookes University.