The era of globalization allows for more connectivity between nations and cultures. This increase in international association gives citizens more availability to take advantage of opportunities in other nations, such as medical assistance and accompanying services. Current Issues and Emerging Trends in Medical Tourism focuses on the emerging phenomena of international travel by patients in search of improved healthcare services and treatment, wellness programs, and complementary recreational activities. Including extensive coverage and case studies focusing on patient mobility and new opportunities for health services across borders, this authoritative reference source is essential to the needs of healthcare providers, nonprofit organizations, students, and medical professionals seeking relevant research on the relationship between global travel and access to healthcare. This publication features innovative, research-based chapters spanning the spectrum of medical travel issues including, but not limited to, customer perceptions, ethical considerations, reproductive medicine, social media use, family caregivers, organ transplants, human trafficking, and surrogacy concerns.

The 'C-Suite' Executive Leader in Sport explores the challenges of this unique role within elite professional sport. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, the book blends academic theory with practitioner interviews from leading figures working a range of elite sporting disciplines and organisations, enhancing understanding of the C-Suite executive within the world of elite sports, where the exploration of the role remains ambiguous and conflicted. The 'C-Suite' Executive Leader in Sport studies a range of issues including global sport governance and best practice, high performance organisations, masterminding innovation and change, diversity and inclusion, current and future key challenges faced by sports organisations, C-Suite leader education and professional development, and the future of the C-Suite leader in elite sport. Examining the lived experience of C-Suite executives, contributors analyse how this relates to existing research, seeking to inform and challenge those individuals responsible for identification, recruitment and promotion of C-Suite sports industry personnel. The book's findings have far reaching implications for analysis of C-Suite effectiveness and efficiency across sporting sectors.

Tourism Governance takes a systematic approach to reveal the varying internal and external dynamics that influence tourism policy and strategy across countries. With particular attention to the role of stakeholders and governmental scales, the book offers a broad geographic representation, highlighting the diversity of governance relationships towards tourism in Colombia, Egypt, Finland, France, India, Italy, Lebanon, Mexico, Oman, Poland, Portugal, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, and United States. Two additional chapters push beyond borders to examine tourism driven nongovernmental organizations and international tourism governance. As the first and only comprehensive comparative analysis of tourism across governmental systems, Tourism Governance promises to be a platform for inspiring critical discourse on the forces that shape this global industry.

Foodservice industry operators today must concern themselves with the evolution of food preparation and service and attempt to anticipate demands and related industry changes such as the supply chain and resource acquisition to not only meet patrons' demands but also to keep their competitive advantage. From a marketing standpoint, the trend toward a more demanding and sophisticated patron will continue to grow through various factors including the promotion of diverse food preparation through celebrity chefs, mass media, and the effect of globalization. From an operational standpoint, managing and controlling the business continues to serve as a critical success factor. Maintaining an appropriate balance between food costs and labor costs, managing employee turnover, and focusing on food/service quality and consistency are fundamental elements of restaurant management and are necessary but not necessarily sufficient elements of success. This increasing demand in all areas will challenge foodservice operators to adapt to new technologies, to new business communication and delivery systems, and to new management systems to stay ahead of the changes. Strategic International Restaurant Development: From Concept to Production explains the world of the food and beverage service industry as well as industry definitions, history, and the status quo with a look towards current challenges and future solutions that can be undertaken when developing strategic plans for restaurants. It highlights trends and explains the logistics of management and its operation. It introduces the basic principles for strategies and competitive advantage in the international context. It discusses the food and beverage management philosophy and introduces the concept of food and beverage service entrepreneurship, restaurant viability, and critical success factors involved in a foodservice business venture. Finally, it touches on the much-discussed topic of the food and beverage service industry and sustainable development. This book is ideal for restaurateurs, managers, entrepreneurs, executives, practitioners, stakeholders, researchers, academicians, and students interested in the methods, tools, and techniques to successfully manage, develop, and run a restaurant in the modern international restaurant industry.

Financial markets are witnessing an unprecedented explosion in the availability of data, and the firms that survive will be able to leverage this information to increase their profit and expand their opportunities in a global world. Large firms must build their own datacenters to manage this data. In such an environment, the CIO s ability is crucial to lead an effective data strategy to capture, process, and connect data to all the relevant lines of business. At the core of this strategy lies the datacenter - the repository of all information. While there are books that discuss the mechanics, hardware and technicalities of datacenters, no book has yet made the connection between enterprise strategy and datacenter investment, design and management. Next Generation DataCenters in Financial Services is a solution driven book for management that demonstrates how to leverage technology to manage the seemingly infinite amount of data available today. Each chapter offers cutting-edge management and technology solutions to effectively manage data through datacenters.
Presents cutting-edge technology solutions not available in one place until now
Includes step-by-step instructions on how to implement a datacenter strategy based on the author s recent success with Wachovia s datacenter
Demonstrates how business and IT can be aligned in financial services"

Walking around the commercial streets of New York, San Francisco, Milan, London, or Paris and looking at the succession of multinational chain stores' windows, you can easily forget what country you are in. However, if you hear the small talk among the employees, you hear very different stories. In New York, a 30-year-old woman is worried because she does not know if she will work enough hours to make a living the following week-whereas, in Milan, a mother of the same age knows she will work 20 hours a week but is concerned about whether her contract will be renewed at the end of the following month. Following three years of fieldwork, which included 100 in-depth interviews with front-line retail workers and unionists in New York City and Milan, Front-Line Workers in the Global Service Economy investigates both the lived experiences of salespersons in the "fast fashion" industry-a retail sector made of large chains of stores selling fashion garments at low prices-and the possibilities of collective action and structured forms of resistance to these global trends. In the face of economic globalization and vigorous managerial efforts to minimize labor costs and to standardize the retail experience, mass fashion workers' stories tell us how strong the pressure toward work devaluation in low-skilled service sectors can be, and how devastating its effects are on the workers themselves.

The tourism industry is the largest service industry and the largest employment generator in the world. This was made possible by increasing globalization and disposable income, with the labor force playing an important role. Factors such as quality of services and business performance depend on a well-educated, well-trained, skilled, enthusiastic, and committed workforce. Contemporary Human Resources Management in the Tourism Industry is a pivotal reference source that provides research on the role of human resource departments in creating value for the workplace through innovation and efficient work processes. While highlighting topics such as organizational structure, gender equality, and employee motivation, this publication explores the development of organizational culture, as well as methods of translating business strategy into action through dramatically managing staff on all levels in the tourism industry. This book is ideally designed for human resources managers, business owners, business professionals, researchers, and academicians seeking current research on the organizational skills and strategies necessary in creating effective tourism businesses.

The Tourist Experience is complex, intrinsically personal, and highly emotional. Consequently, it is not easy to understand what it is that drives us to continue to travel, and to return to places visited. It is important for all sides of the travel, tourism, and hospitality industries to understand what tourists are searching for as well as what they experience, with emotions playing a central role. The research outlined in Unravelling Travelling: Uncovering Tourist Emotions through Autoethnography delves into the deep, personal, and very subjective emotions experienced while travelling to foreign places. Taking an autoethnographic approach, this evocative, reflexive, critical and analytical study uncovers a range of personal emotional drivers that resonate across disciplinary boundaries. Examining the development of autoethnography in the social sciences, where the researchers often expose deeply personal experiences that cannot be directly interpreted from an outsider's perspective, Unravelling Travelling offers an in-depth commentary on the role of autoethnography in the tourism field. This personal account from author Sue Beeton goes beyond simple memoir, exposing the practices of researcher, as well as the methodology employed. Personal travel narratives and poems not only uncover emotions that may not be evident through other research approaches, but also by being highly critical of her own work, Beeton argues the case for and against autoethnography itself.

The Caribbean economy remains a region with many paradoxes. Despite a relative abundance of natural and valuable resources, including its people, large segments of the region still grapple with significant levels of debt, environmental degradation, high unemployment in the formal sector, climate change, limited progress in technological innovation, increasing energy costs, remittance dependency, tourism dependency, loss of correspondent banking relations, exchange rate, noncommunicable diseases, and domestic politics to name more than a few. The poorest countries still lag and remain far more vulnerable to external factors related to trade and global financial sector issues. This edited volume takes a closer look at the contemporary issues related to the economies of the Caribbean. The book provides an added dimension in that each of the chapters includes the contributions of a scholar with lived experiences in and knowledge of the region. Indeed, the book underscores the detailed evidence-based research and perspectives on topics providing insights into the current landscape of the Caribbean. Ultimately, understanding the Caribbean in its varied contexts is an important milestone in pursuing policies that will contribute to flourishing economies replete with sustained growth and development.

Market positioning and branding has evolved from a peripheral process in the marketing effort to a critical process in any strategic planning initiative. Effective positioning will result in a strong brand that develops an emotional and productive two-way relationship. Positioning and Branding Tourism Destinations for Global Competitiveness focuses on utilizing destination branding and content marketing for sustainable growth and competitive advantage within the tourism and hospitality industry, including tools and techniques for travel branding and best practices for better tourism management strategies. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as hospitality, brand loyalty, and knowledge transfer, this book is ideally designed for industry professionals including those within the hotel, leisure, transportation, theme park, and food service sectors, policymakers, practitioners, researchers, and students.

Increased interest in handicrafts has led to more people becoming artisans both as a hobby and a business activity, making Artisan Entrepreneurship a growing phenomenon. This has been particularly relevant during the COVID-19 crisis in which individuals and communities began engaging with more bespoke crafting at home. This book focuses on these practices from different perspectives including the art, cultural and social sectors, thereby highlighting the emerging new types of artisan activity that preserve cultural elements while incorporating emerging technologies like social media. This volume analyses artisan entrepreneurship using different approaches including at an individual, group and societal point of view providing a better understanding about how these handicraft workers contribute to societal wellbeing and aid cultural heritage preservation for future generations. Each chapter of this book looks at these practices in a different way, enabling the practical and theoretical significance of artisan entrepreneurship to emerge and presenting a holistic understanding of artisan entrepreneurship in different contextual settings. Artisan Entrepreneurship provides a unique way in which to understand an important type of enterprise that has been neglected but recently had a resurgence. This book provides a fundamental contribution to the field of artisan entrepreneurship.

Travel is widely acknowledged as an activity that increases individuals' levels of well-being. Nevertheless, the relationship between happiness and tourism is still a matter of investigation. Despite the overall beneficial effects of travel on happiness levels, tourism is not an activity with solely positive implications on peoples' lives. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how happiness manifests through tourism and how it can be expanded to different tourism actors, such as tourists, workers, and communities. The search for ways and methods to enhance the levels of happiness and well-being has grown significantly in recent years. Happiness and quality of life are timely issues and have become even more relevant due to the significant impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Rebuilding and Restructuring the Tourism Industry: Infusion of Happiness and Quality of Life is a critical references source that examines the fundamental relationship between tourism, happiness, and quality of life. This book discusses relevant theoretical frameworks and the latest findings from empirical research in happiness, well-being, and quality-of-life-related tourism. Focusing on topics such as neurotourism, PERMA theory, the economics of happiness, tourism employment opportunity, and overtourism, this book will intrigue scholars working in hospitality, tourism, destination management, economics, marketing, sociology, anthropology, and health sciences as well as managers, travel agencies, restaurateurs, hotel managers, and professionals who want to improve their understanding of the relationship between tourism and happiness, providing them with tools to develop better and sustainable practices for the sector.

Inland territories are currently of great interest in the tourism industry based on their natural and cultural resources, the surroundings and valuing of natural spaces, local traditions and cultures, ways of life, and the experiences of territories with authenticity. In this context, ecocultural resources are determining factors of development for the mobilization of economic and socio-cultural initiatives, promoting tourism and generating conditions of sustainability in inland territories. They are spaces of opportunity, maintaining resources and heritage with high preservation, enhancing new perceptions and forms of use, generating territorial cohesion, promoting self-esteem for local communities, and providing diverse and differentiated tourist experiences. The involvement of the community is decisive in valuing the destination, understanding local ecocultural realities, and developing the processes of preservation and service creation. It is considered a necessary approach for inclusion, protection, and aggregating the ecological and cultural binomial as a determinant for deeper knowledge of territorial realities and their specificities. Thus, sustainability and participation are crucial for the long-term future of inland tourism activities, with local governance assuming an important role in building tourism capacity, mobilizing resources, and streamlining entrepreneurial initiatives. Challenges and New Opportunities for Tourism in Inland Territories: Ecocultural Resources and Sustainable Initiatives provides knowledge on the trends for tourism in inland territories, territorial innovation, good governance practices, new projects in inland tourism, and other important aspects in the field. The topics covered include sustainability of local culture, cultural heritage, social responsibility, local governance, public policies, and innovation and tourism in inland territories. This book is essential for tourism management organizations, environmentalists, hotel managers, restaurateurs, tourism departments, practitioners, policymakers, public officials, researchers, academicians, and students interested in the innovative practices and initiatives in tourism with a specific focus on inland territories.

The market for retirement financial advice has never been more important and yet more in flux. The long-term shift away from traditional defined benefit pensions toward defined contribution personal accounts requires all of us to be more sophisticated today than ever before. However, the landscape for financial advice is changing all over the world, with new rules and regulations transforming the financial advice profession. This volume explores the market for retirement financial advice, to explain what financial advisors do and how to measure performance and impact. Who are these professionals and what standards must they abide by? How do they make money and what are their incentives? How can one protect clients from bad advice, and what is good advice? Does advice alone effect changes in personal habits? Answering these questions, along with new technology that will decrease the delivery costs of advice, will play a transformative role in helping more households receive the quality financial advice that they need. Accordingly, this volume illuminates the market and regulatory challenges so as to enhance consumer, plan sponsor, and regulator decisions.