Ecotourism Development in Costa Rica: The Search for Oro Verde, by Andrew P. Miller, examines the use of ecotourism as a development strategy in Costa Rica and its applicability to other Central American states. Ecotourism provides an important environmental check on industry, giving the environment a voice by making its preservation an economic necessity due to the number of people who derive their income from it. The move away from agriculture to ecotourism is a natural fit because many of those who are engaged in agriculture have extensive knowledge of plants and animals that can be utilized by the ecotourism industry. The use of ecotourism as a development strategy is distinctive. For ecotourism to succeed, it must preserve the natural environment, but it must do so in a way that does not preclude growth in other sectors of the economy. Miller shows how the successful pursuit of foreign direct investment coupled with Costa Rica s immense biodiversity and its attractiveness to tourists is key to understanding the success of the Costa Rican economy. Many of the preferences that ecotourists have for a vacation destination also help create an amenable atmosphere for business. These factors include: political and social stability, high quality of life, low levels of corruption, economic freedom, high levels of education, and a suitable infrastructure. The most important part of this research is its development of strategies based upon the Costa Rican model that would be useful for other states in the region. When looking at whether states can replicate the development strategy of Costa Rica, environmental sustainability is an important concern. Ecotourism Development in Costa Rica is an essential text for students and scholars interested in Latin American politics and history, development studies, and environmental sustainability."

For many decades, the global business events industry operated under the illusion that business event legacies are best measured in terms of coffee cups and hotel rooms. Business Event Legacies: Global industry case studies demonstrates that in fact the tourism contribution made by business events is just the tip of a very big legacy iceberg. The substantial legacies that business events make to academic disciplines, industry and community go 'beyond tourism' and are much more significant. Business Event Legacies: Global industry case studies provides a cutting edge understanding of the legacy in the field of business events, crucial to the future of the industry. Through eight case studies this book will explore how business events are a collision space for ideas, brokering new innovations, generating trade and investment, supporting local communities, academics, industry, and government agendas, and driving knowledge economies. The text begins by explaining the paradigm shift in the understanding of business event legacies, and moves on to introduce a revolutionary six-step plan to analyse legacy success. The proceeding case studies then illustrate how the six-step analysis can be put into practice. Business Event Legacies: Global industry case studies provides: * A comprehensive range of documented business event legacies available * A global range of case studies representing key business events destinations including London, Sydney, Uruguay, Copenhagen, Geneva, Kuching: Malaysia, and Jonkoping: Sweden. * Methodologies for evaluating the legacies and impacts of business events for communities, industries, and government. * Information/understandings crucial for educating future business event professionals * Suggestions for advances in business events education and a future research agenda. Based on robust research framed by the authors' deep understanding of business events, Business Event Legacies: Global industry case studies is a must have text for undergraduate and postgraduate students engaged in the business events sector, academic researchers and practitioners, including executive and marketing staff of convention bureaux and convention centres, as well as professional conference organisers and destination managers.

For many decades, the global business events industry operated under the illusion that business event legacies are best measured in terms of coffee cups and hotel rooms. Business Event Legacies: Global industry case studies demonstrates that in fact the tourism contribution made by business events is just the tip of a very big legacy iceberg. The substantial legacies that business events make to academic disciplines, industry and community go 'beyond tourism' and are much more significant. Business Event Legacies: Global industry case studies provides a cutting edge understanding of the legacy in the field of business events, crucial to the future of the industry. Through eight case studies this book will explore how business events are a collision space for ideas, brokering new innovations, generating trade and investment, supporting local communities, academics, industry, and government agendas, and driving knowledge economies. The text begins by explaining the paradigm shift in the understanding of business event legacies, and moves on to introduce a revolutionary six-step plan to analyse legacy success. The proceeding case studies then illustrate how the six-step analysis can be put into practice. Business Event Legacies: Global industry case studies provides: * A comprehensive range of documented business event legacies available * A global range of case studies representing key business events destinations including London, Sydney, Uruguay, Copenhagen, Geneva, Kuching: Malaysia, and Jonkoping: Sweden. * Methodologies for evaluating the legacies and impacts of business events for communities, industries, and government. * Information/understandings crucial for educating future business event professionals * Suggestions for advances in business events education and a future research agenda. Based on robust research framed by the authors' deep understanding of business events, Business Event Legacies: Global industry case studies is a must have text for undergraduate and postgraduate students engaged in the business events sector, academic researchers and practitioners, including executive and marketing staff of convention bureaux and convention centres, as well as professional conference organisers and destination managers.

This book aims to contribute to the literature and aid in developing a theoretical and practical framework in the area of health and wellness tourism. With contributions and research from different countries using a practical approach, this book is an essential source for students, researchers and managers in the health and wellness tourism industry. Recently, there has been an increased interest in health and wellness due to greater life expectancy, aging populations, increasing levels of stress among others. In this context, the concepts of health, wellness, beauty, relaxation, and tourism can be combined to satisfy the needs of people seeking better quality-of-life. This has given rise to health and wellness tourism, a new market segment that contributes to employment and economic growth in the new economy. Health and wellness tourism involves two aspects: therapeutics, which seeks to cure certain diseases; and relaxation and leisure. As an alternative to traditional tourism, health and wellness tourism provides a new means of achieving regional and local development from a demographic, social, environmental and economic point-of-view. It contributes to tourist destinations' economic growth, acting as a pillar to support other complementary activities. In short, health and wellness tourism contributes to employment growth and regional wealth, contributes to tourism seasonality, promotes quality in tourism destinations, helps create new tourist services with high value, promotes establishment of international cooperation networks, and yields a number of additional benefits. Featuring a variety of programs and initiatives from different regions, with an emphasis on thermal and thalassotherapy establishments, this volume sheds light on this emerging market segment and its implications for economic and policy development.

This fascinating book introduces travelers—of the body or the mind—to a few simple economic concepts that will help them to think differently and more deeply about the differences between the people and the places they visit during their journeys. The principles and mechanics of economics are firmly rooted in everything around us, in our home country as well as in every nation and culture around the world. Having a basic grasp of economics can help all travelers to think more carefully about why things work differently in different places. Armed with this knowledge, readers will be equipped to better appreciate—and learn from—the beauty and complexity of the world around us. The Traveling Economist: Using Economics to Think about What Makes Us All So Different and the Same illustrates important economic concepts that every traveler and world citizen should understand. Employing clear, jargon-free explanations and illustrated with real-life examples, Knoop uniquely focuses on the interplay between travel and economics. He uses our shared travel experiences to illustrate exactly how economic thinking supplies such a powerful framework for understanding the world around us. More than simply explaining economics through travel experiences, this book enables adventurers who desperately want to avoid being tourists—i.e., people who travel to see what they know is there—to become explorers: those who learn each and every day from what they witness.

The Student Book and ActiveBook has clearly laid out pages with a range of supportive features to aid learning and teaching: Getting to know your unit sections ensure learners understand the grading criteria and unit requirements. Getting ready for Assessment sections focus on preparation for external assessment with guidance for learners on what to expect. Hints and tips will help them prepare for assessment and sample answers are provided for a range of question types including, short and long answer questions, all with a supporting commentary. Learners can also prepare for internal assessment using this feature. A case study of a learner completing the internal assessment for that unit covering 'How I got started', 'How I brought it all together' and 'What I got from the experience'. Pause Point features provide opportunities for learners to self-evaluate their learning at regular intervals. Each Pause Point point feature gives learners a Hint or Extend option to either revisit and reinforce the topic or encourage independent research or further study skills. Case Study and Theory in Practice features enable development of problem-solving skills and place the theory into real life situations learners could encounter. Assessment Activity/Practice features provide scaffolded assessment practice activities that help prepare learners for formative assessment. Within each assessment practice activity, a Plan, Do and Review section encourages supports learners' formative assessment by to making sure they fully understand what they are being asked to do, what their goals are and how to evaluate the task and consider how they could improve. Dedicated Think Future pages provide case studies from the industry, with a focus on aspects of skills development that can be put into practice in a real work environment and further study.

This book provides holistic insights into management of protected areas across East Asia and identifies current trends in mountain tourism within the broader field of human geography and nature conservation. The book describes the diversification in visitors and expanding protected areas territories in different Asian countries during recent years. It also compares protected areas networks in the context of the changing demographic profiles of visitors and provides an interdisciplinary transnational appraisal of mountain-based tourism in Asia based on national and international statistics. The research combines specific case studies at the individual country and destination level with trans-regional trends, thereby offering analysis from both the perspective of supply (parks, protected areas, and stakeholders) and demand (mountain tourist market trends and segments). The book is a useful resource for students and academics in tourism and protected areas studies as well as social scientists and policy-makers interested in Asian countries.

Tourism is one of the leading industries worldwide. The magnitude of growth in tourism will bring both opportunities and problems to source and destination markets in years to come, especially in the internal and external exchange of information in the industry. ""Information and Communication Technologies in Support of the Tourism Industry"" examines the process of transformation as it relates to the tourism industry, and the changes to that industry from modern electronic communications. ""Information and Communication Technologies in Support of the Tourism Industry"" covers not only geographically supportive technologies in communication, but also in terms of culture, economics, marketing, social, and regional issues. In-depth analyses range from the use of the Internet to supply information to the emerging patterns of tourist decision making and investments.

Tour guides, a highly responsible group of professionals who are in direct communication with tourists traveling around the world, have a great impact on the proper promotion of the culture of countries, global peace, and tolerance. Additionally, they are also effective in the preservation of world natural heritage. Thus, the educational status of tour guides, as well as the characteristics and ethical values that they should possess, need to be examined on an international scale. In today's world, where tourism demand is directed towards all types of tourism, practices in special interest tourism should be customized in order to ensure the highest level of service quality and cultural appreciation. Cases on Tour Guide Practices for Alternative Tourism provides emerging research exploring the theoretical and practical aspects of the occupational issues that surround tour guides and their applications within international tourism. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as cultural education, specialized learning, and international business, this book is ideally designed for tour guides, travel agencies, tour managers, tour developers, heritage sites, museums, academicians, researchers, students, industry experts, and hospitality professionals.

Knowledge Management is concerned with all aspects of eliciting, acquiring, modelling, and managing knowledge. Application of knowledge resources successfully helps the organization to deliver creative products and services. Especially in service business, service job experience and information about the customer, as well as the installed site equipment, are key factors to deliver services efficiently and with high quality. In many cases supporting information is stored in different backend systems and it needs to be retrieved, aggregated, and presented on demand. Knowledge Management and Drivers of Innovation in Services Industries provides a comprehensive collection of knowledge from experts within the Information and Knowledge Management field. Outlining areas on Knowledge Management, Innovation, Information Technologies and Systems, and Services Industry, this book provides insight for academic professors, policymakers, and students alike.

This book gathers the proceedings of the ICAFFI International Conference on Accounting, Finance and Financial Institutions. The main topics addressed include: corporate finance, financial markets and asset pricing, empirical finance, taxation, financial risk management, international finance, financial econometrics, financial reporting and accounting standards, managerial accounting, measuring financial performance, accounting information systems, and current issues in accounting and finance in emerging and other markets. Presenting both cutting-edge research and a broad set of methods, and combining practical and theoretical perspectives, the book offers a valuable resource for researchers, practitioners and regulators alike.

The process of globalization based on major forms of entertainment consumption has promoted the interest of enlarged social actors toward cultural experiencing. Disseminated by social media, new forms of information and knowledge about exotic tourism destinations have endorsed an increasing interest in forms of cultural tourism. This cultural tourism turnout results from a significant change in the traveler's demands and behaviors and has led to a new and renovated interest in cultural heritage that must be studied further. The Handbook of Research on Cultural Tourism and Sustainability explores theoretical concepts related to cultural tourism and cultural routes and provides original viewpoints and empirical research with case studies and best practices for the future of cultural tourism. Covering a range of topics such as creative tourism and sustainable tourism, this major reference work is ideal for academicians, practitioners, professionals, policymakers, government officials, instructors, and students.

This book explores the impact of design science and design thinking on tourism planning, gathering contributions from leading authorities in the field of tourism research and providing a comprehensive and interconnected panorama of cutting-edge results that influence the current and future design of tourist destinations. The book builds on recent findings in psychology, geography and urban and regional planning, as well as from economics, marketing and communications, and explores the opportunities arising from recent advances in the Internet and related technologies like memory, storage, RFID, GIS, mobile and social media in the context of collecting and analyzing traveler-related data. It presents a broad range of insights and cases on how modern design approaches can be used to develop new and better touristic experiences, and how they enable the tourism industry to track and communicate with visitors in a more meaningful way and more effectively manage visitor experiences.

There are four core themes developed in Patient-Centred Health Care which deal with critical issues, models, theories and frameworks (both theoretical and empirical) that expound understandings of patient centred care and the processes, practices and behaviours supporting its attainment: 1. Conceptions and cultures of patient-centred care2. Coordinating for care 3. Communicating for care4. Innovations in patient centred care and the patient experienceSection 1 of this book sets out the origins of the approach of patient centredness, allowing the reader to recognise what this means and looks like, institutionally and educationally, as well as recognising the implications of its absence. Section 2 concentrates on the process of team working itself which may be patient centred but is also involved with co-operation and co-ordination across professional and organisational boundaries. Section 3 focuses on communication within, between and across patients and teams, and Section 4 highlights the innovations in patient centred care that will enable further progress in the field. In each section, the editors illuminate key issues through a case-study of a relevant intervention to support patient-centred care.

Financial services technology and its effect on the field of finance and banking has been of major importance within the last few years. The spread of these so-called disruptive technologies, including Blockchain, has radically changed financial markets and transformed the operation of the industry as a whole. This is the first multidisciplinary handbook of FinTech and Blockchain covering finance, economics, and legal aspects globally. With comprehensive coverage of the current landscape of financial technology alongside a forward-looking approach, the chapters are devoted to the spread of structured finance, ICT, distributed ledger technology (DLT), cybersecurity, data protection, artificial intelligence, and cryptocurrencies. Given an unprecedented 2020, the contributions also address the consequences of the current emergency, and the pandemic stroke, which is revolutionizing social and economic paradigms and heavily affecting Fintech, Blockchain, and the banking sector as well, and would be of particular interest to finance academics and researchers alongside banking and financial services professionals.

This book investigates the various ties between tourism development and sustainability, revealing forces of change and current trends in tourism management performance in countries of Central and Southeast Europe. The contributions explore how the tourism industry is responding to numerous related challenges while managing risks with the aim of enhancing tourism management performance. In addition, it offers insights into the interconnections between tourism and other industries. In brief, the book offers an innovative, quantitative and qualitative scientific approach to the topic, along with conclusions and concrete policy recommendations.

Archaeological sites opened to the public, and especially those highly photogenic sites that have achieved iconic status, are often major tourist attractions. By opening an archaeological site to tourism, threats and opportunities will emerge.The threats are to the archaeological record, the pre-historic or historic materials in context at the site that can provide facts about human history and the human relationship to the environment. The opportunities are to share what can be learned at archaeological sites and how it can be learned. The latter is important because doing so can build a public constituency for archaeology that appreciates and will support the potential of archaeology to contribute to conversations about contemporary issues, such as the root causes and possible solutions to conflict among humans and the social implications of environmental degradation. In this volume we will consider factors that render effective management of archaeological sites open to the public feasible, and therefore sustainable. We approach this in two ways: The first is by presenting some promising ways to assess and enhance the feasibility of establishing effective management. Assessing feasibility involves examining tourism potential, which must consider the demographic sectors from which visitors to the site are drawn or might be in the future, identifying preservation issues associated with hosting visitors from the various demographic sectors, and the possibility and means by which local communities might be engaged in identifying issues and generating long-term support for effective management. The second part of the book will provide brief case studies of places and ways in which the feasibility of sustainable management has been improved.