Professor Chris Ryan undertakes research in the field of tourism and has developed research interests in China in the last two decades, including contractual work with Chinese partners such as Beijing Union University, Sun Yat-sen University and others. He has also undertaken reports for the United Nations World Tourism Organization in China, is editor of Tourism Critiques: Practice and Theory, and for 25 years was editor of Tourism Management and took it to its current position as the leading tourism research journal. He also founded Tourism Management Perspectives, which is also a SSCI cited journal. Tourism Critiques is fully Plan S compliant.

As a researcher, according to Google Scholar Citations, he has over 36,000 citations and has an h-index of 86. He has authored or co-authored approximately 300 refereed journal articles and 15 books, the latest are Advanced Tourist Destination Management (Edward Elgar, 2020) and (with Nancy Zhang) Tourist Experiences: Insights from Psychology (Channel View, 2024) and Sex Tourism in Kenya with Dr Rose Omondi (Cambridge Scholars. He currently is working on two further books, the first of which will be published late in 2025. and the second in 2026.

He has worked with various organisations including the Terracotta Warriors Museum and the Fuxi Mausoleum in China. Within New Zealand he has completed work for Tourism New Zealand, the former Ministry of Tourism and subsequently the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, Tourism Auckland, Tourism Waikato and individual private sector organisations. He is an Honorary Tourism Advisor for the City of Tianjin in China. Additionally, he has been advising and helping in research with the University of the Philippines, Diliman, in the establishment of the Batanes Islands as a member of the Monitoring Centres Network for Sustainable Tourism.

His research interests include tourist behaviours and the consequences of those behaviours in terms of impacts - social, psychological and environmental; and the business organisations that shape those tourist experiences. He has also established a research base studying Raglan under the principles of the INSTO programme (web page under construction). Details on the China-New Zealand Tourism Research Unit can be found at: https://www.nzchinatourism.com/

His position at Waikato is partly funded by Beijing Union University as co-partners in the BUU China-New Zealand Tourism Research Unit. He was noted by PLOS 1 as being one of the top 0.5 % of global researchers.
He has successfully guided more than 30 students through their doctoral degree programmes and many now occupy senior university positions as professors, heads of faculty and research centres.