Vol. X, no. 2/2014

The paper tackles the issue of organizational change in the tourism industry. The tourism industry is faced with a dynamic and complex environment that exerts constant pressures on its organizations and the adequate response of SMEs in tourism consists in making organizational changes. The paper examines four dimensions of organization`s ability to cope with change: (1) communication between the organization and its external environment, (2) the process dimension, (3) participation and communication, and (3) the capacity for change.

Tourism is nowadays recognized as an important sector that has an impact on the development of country economy. Tourism activities have a real impact on economic and social development as they contribute to the GDP and because of its role that it plays on the labor market. The ability of the national economy to benefit from tourism depends on the availability of investment to develop the necessary infrastructure and on its ability to supply the needs of tourists. Hosting sports megaevents is a theme with important impacts on the national economy. The scope of the paper is to present the impact of sports mega-events tourism on the hosting city/country. The paper also treats why sport mega-events are an attractive opportunity for countries but also what some possible loses may appear if choosing to host them.

Tourism represents all the relationships that can result from the movement and the holidays of peoples that spend time outside their residence, people who are not motivated by a permanent establishment or a gainful activity. From this brief definition, it can be said that the tourism industry is one of the most important industries of a country or a region and it is an industry which generates capital, jobs and creates the image of a country / region. Noteworthy is that the tourism industry is constantly evolving and with the acceleration of technical progress, the tourism industry is also growing. This evolution cause the appearance of new types of tourism, which gradually turns into tourism market niches. This article aims to identify and describe the two major forms of tourism, and to emphasize the importance of each of them on the tourism market in Romania. The structure of the article comprise: a brief introduction, the relation between mass tourism and niche tourism, tourism niche in the literature, niche tourism types and conclusions related to niche tourism development in Romania.

Measuring customer satisfaction is indispensable nowadays, for public organizations, to verify if they are doing the right thing. The position of a public institution is not always easy, because of the nature of the client on the one hand and the public, on the other hand. Citizens / customers have different faces and different roles; sometimes they are customers service and sometimes behave as citizens, especially when they have to pay taxes or comply with certain rules. This is reflected also in differences between the provision of public services and the provision of services in the private sector. In addition, most public sector organizations are providing services. Services have some clear characteristics that make them special and different as products, therefore, customer satisfaction measurement is vital for the development and continuity of services, especially in tourism. Service-quality studies in the tourism and hospitality industry are important in identifying the factors that determine visitors’ satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The present article focuses on measuring the tourist satisfaction with a destination and the specific methodology.

The purpose of this article is to show the vital need for human resources in tourism, the contact of the employee with the customers and the direct influence purchasing a service. Albanian potential tourism sources, the foreign request for this destination and also the situation of human resources in the tourism industry. The improvement of the quality of human resources being key factor to succeed in this sector. In this article will consider the request for the Albanian tourism destination also the quality of human resources in this sector. It will be shown how obvious is the influence of seasonal work in human resources skills and competencies in the tourism sector, a factor which shows that tourism services management must fix this gap by relative improvement and the right training methods.

The study investigates and analyzes the representation of on-line content emerging from travel blogs as part of a narrative process. To analyze the tourist image and other relevant characteristics revealed from the text of the travel blogs, text mining techniques are used to analyze the blogs corpus. The city of Bucharest is the case study of this research that helps us to examine the characteristics of over 600 travel blogs before and after the integration into the EU. The aim is to provide insights into the image communicated by tourists through their social narrative experience and to bring into the light the produced image of the chosen destination throughout the two respective periods. The research sharpens our understanding about the path of one former communist capital city and the role of tourism and blogging for city production. In doing so, it will broaden the geography of tourism research and it will offer a bridge between the little explored tourism of the capital cities of Central and Eastern Europe and the tourism of other capital cities.

The universities in our country, like others in Europe, pass through major changes that must help them meet increasingly important challenges. The last decade has been marked by changes produced in the higher learning institutions in European countries, following the transformations generated by the Bologna Process in the academic world. In Austria, Spain, Germany different initiatives regarding the way of making change happen in higher learning institutions have taken place. Keeping this in mind we considered as necessary an analysis of the opinion of academic educational services consumers in Romania, linked to the changes registered following this reform. This research represents something new for the Romanian academic environment, because such an analysis has not been made before on the level of the economic university environment. We were interested especially in the opinions of the students which follow the courses of the Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies (the most prestigious Romanian institution of this type, which has marked a century of existence last year). The paradigm change, from the traditional perspective on education towards a knowledge society perspective implies the need for higher and higher competitiveness of the educational systems.

The concept of Cultural Industry has become more and more up-to-date during the 3-4 decades in the field of Culture; it works to equal human talents with their way of expression. Within UNESCO and OMC organizations, thy cultural industries, also called creative, are based on a combination between creation, production, distribution and promotion of goods and services typical for culture, due to their origin and structure; they are protected by their rights of intellectual property. This concept has also appeared due to UNESCO, even since 1986. It has been defined as related to the cultural means of expression, in the context of the 2005 UNESCO Convention regarding the protection and promotion of the different ways to emphasize cultural. Still, these cultural ways of expression are directly influenced by the multiple demographic characteristics of a nation. The choice of the cultural action is made both by the majority of the population and the ethnic groups according to the number of inhabitants, density, age, group distribution, education, profession, living area and quality of life. After 1989, Romania has been crossing both a period of economic and demographic transition, with negative implied accents. In May the 1th 2014, the population number was of 19.517.953, 44% living in the country, respectively. 69.7% represents the group of 15-64 age, 14.7% the over 65 age and the rest are the 0-14 age. The main ethnic groups are represented by the Romanians who are the majority, Hungarians, Gypsies, Ukrainians, Lipovenians, Serbs, Slovenians, Bulgarians and Turks. Within this context we can find modern cultural manifestations, as well as traditional ones. After 1990, the freedom of expression and cultural manifestation is reflected in Romania by the multiple cultural activities which have been determined just by the creative industry itself. The present research emphasizes the way by which the creative industry has appeared and developed according to the main demographic characteristics for a longer period of time.

Tourism, as a distinct field of activity, is strongly linked to climate change: in a positive way – by providing the necessary resources and factors to reduce the action of climate change through the use of alternative energy technologies with low environmental impact, and the controlled development of tourist flows – and a negative one – through energy consumption, visitors transportation, the quantities of waste. Among the solutions mentioned, the present research has focused on protected areas since the argument was less debated in the scientific literature, but also in business practice. As the main service providers regarding ecosystems and biological resources, protected areas meet the requirements to preserve species worldwide and are vulnerable to climate change. Tourism in protected may became a tourist travel motive more prominent in the future as the natural environment and the species from protected areas are threatened by climate change. Therefore, the paper explains different climate change impacts and implications for tourism in protected areas. The research field proposed aimed to assess the direct and indirect impact of climatic changes for tourism in protected areas. The objectives were related to: determine the level of importance of different changes in the structure of the major components of tourism in protected area under the direct climate change impact; indicate the importance level of changes in natural characteristics of environments which could influence negative tourism by reducing the perceived attractiveness of a protected area, under indirect climate change impact; highlight the importance level of modifications, induced by indirect climate change impact, in socio-economic environment of local communities in protected areas which could affect tourism. Based on the research findings proposals for an appropriate strategy in the field of climate change mitigation was elaborated. This work was supported by the project “Excellence academic routes in the doctoral and postdoctoral research – READ” co-funded from the European Social Fund through the Development of Human Resources Operational Programme 2007-2013, contract no. POSDRU/159/1.5/S/137926.