This special issue of Tékhne – Review of Applied Management Studies is dedicated to the IV International Congress on Tourism of the School of Management of the Polytechnic Institute of Cávado and Ave, which took place on December 3–5, 2015, in Guimarães, Portugal, under the main theme “Tourism for the 21st Century”. The Congress addressed several issues related to the future of tourism with a “back to basics” approach to new challenges and trends. This thematic issue contains five articles presented at the Congress and selected for publication. All of the selected articles were submitted to the journal's peer-review process.
The first article, authored by Maria do Rosário Mira, Andreia Moura, and Zelia Breda, contemplates the theme of tourism destination competitiveness based on the Portuguese reality. This paper intends to contribute to the insight on destination competitiveness, more specifically, how it can be evaluated, the indicators it is based on, and the information available in Portugal to help companies and organizations from the tourism sector conduct their diagnoses on the status and evolution of tourism in general. The empirical analysis is undertaken based on data collected from the main Portuguese official open access databases, between May and June of 2014.
In the second article, Julianna Barcelos de Carvalho, Roberto Bartholo, and Francisco Duarte use a case study methodology to explore the relationship between organizational ergonomics and hospitality management. The research aims to identify how organizational ergonomics can help to improve hospitality service quality. The Ergonomics Work Analysis (EWA) is conducted in 2015 on a hotel front desk, located in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
The following article is by Hortêncio André Constantino, Paula Odete Fernandes, and João Paulo Teixeira. The purpose of the study is to model and forecast tourism demand for the country of Mozambique using Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) models. Tourism demand is represented by the overnight stays in hotels and is monitored on a monthly basis over the period between January of 2004 and December of 2013 from a set of variables presumed to influence the number of overnight stays by 5 major tourist issuing countries for Mozambique, more specifically: Mozambique, South Africa, United States of America, Portugal, and the United Kingdom.
The fourth article addresses the topic of accessible tourism based on a multidisciplinary approach. Naci Polat and Elke Hermans use exploratory research to develop a model of sustainable accessible tourism (SAT). The proposed model consists of macro and micro levels. At the macro level, the relationship between governments, intergovernmental organizations, and non-governmental organizations is underlined. At the micro level, sustainable accessible destination experience is revealed by sustainable accessibility factors at the destination and travel restrictions/advantages per mode.
In the fifth and final article, Mihai Bulai, Mihail Eva, and Lucian Rosu focus on religious tourism. In particular, they provide an analysis of tourism features and a tourism development strategy for the Imam Al Bukhari Complex, a holy site in the Samarkand region of Uzbekistan. The main research methods employed are qualitative, including direct observation, interviews with visitors and stakeholders, and analysis of online resources.
