Pedro Longart

Early in his career Pedro studied Industrial Engineering but soon after that he went into business and management. He moved to the UK in 2000 and changed his career path into management in hospitality (restaurant and hotels) and retail and then completed a BA (Hons) in Hospitality Management at the University of West London and an MBA at Kingston University.

Whilst doing the MBA Pedro discovered an interest for consumer behaviour and particularly consumer decision making in restaurants. That interest in researching consumers led him to write his first research paper “What drives Word of Mouth in Restaurants” published in the International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management in January 2010.

Pedro works as an hourly paid lecturer and researches at the same time so at the moment not much time for anything else apart from his wife and daughter. However, his lifetime passion is chess. Pedro started playing at the tender age of 10 and won a number of championships as a teenager and then played for the Capablanca chess club in London until the team disbanded a few years ago. On the rare occasion you can find him playing in chess.com. It seems that the team will regroup this year so if that happens once or twice a month will be back in the London chess league.

His interest for research continued by starting a research degree at New Bucks University (High Wycombe, UK) which is in collaboration with Coventry University.  Investigating for the proposal for the PhD, he read about Consumer Decision and Conjoint Analysis and he was fascinated by its possibilities and found out about Sawtooth software, the leading platform for those ones convinced in the power and benefits of conjoint. The research titled “Consumer Decision making in restaurant selection” is based on respondents in the UK. In the arguments to defend the methodology used he stressed the advantages of Adaptive Choice Based Conjoint, because it is particularly suitable for investigating the decision to choose restaurants and into restaurant attributes. The restaurant attributes to research through ABCB have been previously elicited through primary research (Focus Group Interviews).