Economics and Management of Turism

Tourism sector has significant weight in the countries gross domestic product and also contributes to equilibrate the balance of transactions, to extend the transactions of goods and sewrvices, to increase the employment, to develop the in terchange between cultures, as well as the mobility of people. Tourism impacts are not always positive, however, the positive aspects of the social, environmental, technological and economic impacts are superior to the negative ones.

The main new trends of tourism are based on the more relevant mankind needs of going out from routine, in the pressure of daily life, in safety, in healthy life lind in the nature, what consequently implies the development of tourism offer segments, such as short city breaks, cruise tourism, health and wellness tourism and also eco-tourism. Although the sun and beach product, during summertime, be the first choice of tourists, the cultural and business tourism are products that are sold in the other three seasons of the year.

In this book, the authors intend to contribute with some answers about the trends and the recent developments of tourism. The articles were presented in lhe 3rd International conference on Advanced Tourism Economics that was held nl Lusiada University, in 2009. The conference had 170 participants, being 120 foreigners, from 27 nationalities. We had parallel session with 19 panels. Only one panel was in Portuguese language, with 8 communications. In total, the 'o nference had 147 comunications, and 139 were in English.

In order to maintain the spirit of the conference, the selected papers of this book are 14 written in English and 4 in Portuguese.

These papers were evaluated by three blind reviwers and selected to belong to this book, due to its quality. Without doubt, other articles had equal high quality level, but the limit of pages was our major constraint, althought this limit was exceeded.

This book is organized in seven parts, such as is shown in Figure 1. Parts I and II have two articles, one is written in Portuguese and one in English. Part III has three articles, being two in Portuguese and one in English. Parts IV, V, VI and VII have all the articles written in English.