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The article presents information on the 2005 Biennial Conference of the International Academy for the Study of Tourism (IAST) that was held in Beijing, China. IAST is a self-recruiting group of scholars following the honoured traditions of British clubs. Fellowship is not open to any fee paying associates. It can only be achieved by invitation of the confreres after a finicky selection process that includes a highly qualified quorum of affirmative ballots. IAST, founded in 1988, was one of the harbingers of the growing demand for excellence in tourism research and has tried to keep true to this goal since. At any rate, only active IAST fellows are invited to participate in the sessions, although each one of them has the right to invite one guest if the latter contributes a paper to the proceedings. IAST fellows have many different academic backgrounds and a plurality of research strategies. This makes a second specialty for IAST conferences. In order to accommodate a number of papers with no common focus, their leitmotiv has to be as encompassing as the one for this Ninth Biennial Session in Beijing.