Vol. XIII, no. 1/2016

Society nowadays is increasingly reliant on technology and the trend for the following years seems to maintain. At the same time, public and private organizations are searching for ways to innovate and optimize their activities and the internet as well as the increased use of electronic devices provide new perspectives for this. Besides the public sector, high ranking companies from domains such as commerce to health or tourism, have started using a new tool: gamification. While some of the first attempts to implement the idea of ‘games’ for selling products go as far back as 1912, the scientific concept of ‘gamification’ is quite new and has just recently been recognized as a study domain. In addition to this, a rising interest in the field is also proven by an increase in number of searches for the term on search engines as well as in scientific databases. From an organizational point of view, through the use of these techniques, institutions can obtain a positive influence on sales, enhanced customer retention, better marketing, improved employee-management communication, overall optimization of activity etc. This paper aims to offer a contribution to the research in the field of gamification, to show some of the revolutionary solutions found by top organizations, based on gaming techniques, and to propose a model for implementing gamification in a tourism organization. The research starts from studying the gamification model implemented by leading tourism platform, Tripadvisor and focuses on building a game-specific architecture that can be applied to Romanian tourism sites, ranging from tourist review sites, such as turistinfo.ro to online tourism agencies. This model includes elements specific to games, and characteristic for the gamification concept, such as: avatar, rewards, challenges, points, badges, leaderboard. The study finishes with opinions regarding the economic and social benefits of implementing gamification as an innovative technique in tourism and conclusions.

In a global society, defined by the disappearance of borders of any kind, the unprecedented intensification of competition compels companies, regardless of the economic sector in which they operate, to permanently adapt their products and services to customers’ requirements. However, the challenge lies precisely in the fact that consumer demands are in a constantly and increasingly accelerated change. If until some time ago products and services were generally chosen based on value for money, now the trend is to make choices based on the fact that these represent a new concept, a new experience, so that innovation is more and more appreciated and gradually turns into the most appropriate way to bring added value to companies. The concept is evolving fast, however, and innovation no longer refers only to the creation of new products or services, but also, why not, even to the development of new strategies, most often marketing and management strategies, aimed at enhancing performance at the microeconomic level. It is obvious that pioneers in the creation of such successful strategies are primarily companies with economic power and know-how, often multinational companies, which outline directions in this respect and become real business performance models. Concrete examples regarding the use of innovation for achieving business excellence can be easily found in tourism, which is currently the fastest growing economic sector in the world. Thus, development strategies existing especially in the international hotel chains turn into real best practices not only for the hospitality industry, but also for other areas, contributing primarily to the companies’ success, but, furthermore, also to increasing the competitiveness of the whole world economy. This article aims to bring to the fore some of the innovative strategies successfully used by one of the largest hotel groups globally and, starting from the analysis of the current state of the hospitality industry in Romania, to identify some ways forward for increasing business performance.

A major challenge for any organization, which happens once in many years, is related to business succession. Given the specificity of the tourism industry, the takeover of a business depends on the managerial capacity of successor. Leadership is considered one of the key success factors in the businesses and therefore of their transformation. Leadership is also very important when we talk about the relationship between the members of the organization and motivating staff within them. This paper proposes to establish which are the appropriate leadership key skills, competence and knowledge for micro and small enterprises managers, for successfully taking over enterprises, within Europe’s tourism industry. For a clear picture about leadership competences, we considered the following key characteristics: management successors set an exemplary standard to co-workers and give directions both professionally and personally, management successors implement the necessary changes, management successors are open minded to new ideas and know how to assess risks, management successors check compliance of colleagues with professional, social and quality oriented standards, management successors are giving feedback and support personal development, management successors resolve conflict with and between co-workers. The secondary objective of the paper is to test correlation between leadership knowledge, skills and competences for successful business succession. To achieve these objectives, we analysed and interpreted partial results of a quantitative research, based on an online questionnaire. The results of this research can constitute a foundation to further policy papers for the business environment in European tourism.

The objective of this article is to shed insight on the tourism assistance and services that can be developed to optimize the tourism flow. This article will expose the fact that tourism combines several services, such as transport, accommodation, food, recreation, events, that make up the integrated tourism product and its marketing arrangements. Part of tourism services are designed to cover basic, everyday needs like rest, food, and another part is dedicated to specific necessities and particularities of tourism services (recreation, treatment, travel arrangements, etc.). The dynamism of tourism leads to the need for improvement of existing tourism services and develop new forms of tourism. Meanwhile developing tourism assistance and services leads to regional economic growth and professional development of people. Tourism plays an important role in the development of Romania's economic future and it is important to ensure that tourism resources are fully valued. Business trips or trips to congresses, conferences, meetings, etc. continue to develop, with increasing benefits for organizers. Many people who are involved in such activities are, in the same time, “holiday” tourists who want to discover the area that they are visiting. Tourism products and services are designed and developed to meet the needs of existing and potential customers. Tourists are becoming more experienced and sophisticated and expect high quality attractions, utilities and services, and rates / prices suited to their travels quality. Provided that everything mentioned above is the main reason or motivation to develop tourism and its services for visitors to events in which they participate; we will analyze possible options for improving the above mentioned services.

The present paper has as theme of research „The role of nonformal education in forming young economists”. These papers’ objectives/purposes are to identify the benefits of nonformal education in parallel with the formal education and it’s position to it. The specific purposes of this paper are to identify the number of youngsters that are involving themselves in these types of activities for a period larger than a year, to identify the impact of this type of education on the youngsters’ competences and also the influence of this on people’s personality. In order to reach these objectives, as a research method it was conducted a quantitative research (a set of questionnaires for the two target groups), as well as a qualitative research (one interview). The results of the research outlined that nonformal education completes the formal one and that the benefits of the two combined are big in number. So, the nonformal education is the practical expression of the formal education and it is the launching ramp in putting the bases of a career. The conclusions bring into sight the fact that young volunteers are more involved in the activities they deploy and have more trust in their abilities. So, the youngsters develop leadership and communication skills, these being of good use in the future.

Online reviews represent one of the basic functionalities implemented under the Web 2.0 concept. Implementing the functionality of achieving reviews was made on public platforms and became the de facto standard for all web applications involving interaction between service/products providers and Internet users. Reviews information sources are used differently: first are followed peripherals clues (synthetic evaluation based on stars or ranking) as a stage of information retrieval and, after that, the processing of basic information (reviews) is shaping the person’s choosing alternatives. The study involved the use of exploratory research method. In this research we have undertaken an investigation which used a survey which was completed by 230 heterogeneous people The research resulted in finding preferred media information and the type of users who use them. Throughout our paper, the answers to two core questions concerning the approached theme can be found:• How important is, for a potential client, the online information, based on reviews published by other clients, made before choosing a tourist service?• How much do the online reviews influence the decision of buying a travel package? During the survey challenges have emerged whose solution requires additional research, thus reinforcing the importance of the chosen theme.