Editor’s note

Abstract

The first issue of the European Journal of Tourism, Hospitality and Recreation (EJTHR) was launched during the 4th International Tourism Congress – ITC 2010 – that took place in Peniche, in the School of Tourism and Maritime Technology (ESTM) at the Polytechnic Institute of Leiria (IPL).

Since 2007, ITC has gone step by step through an innovative way, sharing the new scientific knowledge amongst the academic community of tourism. Growing consistently since the first edition, this fourth edition of this congress represented a great success from the point of view of the international representativeness: the number of foreign scholars who submitted their communications to this international meeting became clearly higher than the number of national representatives. Besides this, the quality of most papers presented was a reality. As a consequence, the editor-in-chief of the EJTHR proposed to the Scientific Committee of the Congress the following challenge: to select the best 10 papers presented to the congress for publication in the European Journal of Tourism, Hospitality and Recreation. This challenge was accepted, and now we have the honor to present our readers some of the most interesting empirical research submitted to the congress.

Consequently, in the promotional brochure of the ITC 2010, one could read: «a special issue of the EJTHR exclusively dedicated to this congress will be published». However, some weeks after, the EJTHR’s Editorial Board took the decision to include these papers in a regular issue, avoiding this way to categorize them as “congress papers”. This decision was based on the fact that an autonomous and anonymous evaluation, made by EJTHR’s reviewers, have considered them good enough to avoid such “label”.

For the present issue we selected seven papers of the ITC 2010, including this one that was awarded with the prize of Best Paper: “The impact of secondary information sources on the formation of the tourist image. The case of rural tourism in Galicia”, submitted by María José Andrade Suárez, from the University of A Coruña, Spain.

However, the remaining six papers are also innovative and deserve the reader’s attention, namely:

“Islandness and remoteness as resources: Evidence from the tourism performance of small remote island economies”, submitted by Shamnaaz Sufrauj (University of Trento, Italy). The author’s conclusion seems to be very interesting: “tourism demand is negatively affected by being an island, a small country, or a remote country, but favoured by being a small or a remote island”.

“Effects of climate change on Romanian mountain tourism: are they positive or mostly negative?”, submitted by four members of the National Institute for Research and development in Tourism, Romania (Surugiu, Surugiu, Frent & Breda). This paper focuses on a up-to- -date problem, which must be more and more scrutinized in the future.

A group of researchers of the Azores University (Calado, Rodrigues, Silveira & dentinho) present a study entitled “Rural tourism associated with agriculture as an economic alternative for the farmers”, which shows how to use the Geographical Information Systems as a tool for private and public decision-making concerning tourism planning.

A new branch of research is the so-called film tourism, which is addressed to the feature film impacts on the tourist image and on the willingness to visit a tourist destination. A research group from the University of Vigo (Rodríguez Campo, Fraiz Brea & Muñiz), presented an empirical study about the impact of a specific film: “Tourist destination image formed by the cinema: Barcelona positioning analysis through the feature film Vicky Cristina Barcelona”.

A benchmarking study involved twelve different European countries was conducted by a research group of the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain (Castro, Iglesias, Piñeira & Paül). The collected information allowed authors to develop applicability models for other geographic realities, but above all, for the tourism reality of Galicia.

Finally, a researcher of the University of Aveiro (Josefina Salvado) presents a travel experience ecosystem model (TEEM), which was designed to bolster the travel agencies’ business resilience.

This issue presents also a tribute in memoriam to Rachid Amirou, an Algerian/French sociologist whose contribution to the deep understanding of tourism phenomena remains still almost unknown in the Anglo-Saxon scientific community, aside his great popularity in France. The authors of this tribute share with the readers their personal testimonies and also present a synthesis of his most relevant ideas.

So, on behalf of the EJTHR’s Editorial Board we hope that this journal issue will be useful for both the scientific community and professionals in Tourism.