Nowadays, the economic model of ski resort is perturbed by new pressure on lodging and development of short stays. Suburban resorts are particularly facing these new challenges. This article considers them as laboratories and aims to present the results of a consumers’survey.

The study of the town of Marrakech allows one to map the evolution of touristic housing, as well as the different ways of viewing the world attached to these accommodations. One can divide them into three big categories. Hotel clubs make up the first, unrated hotels the second, and Riad Guest Houses (RGH), the third. The three aforementioned categories represent three distinct stages in the evolution of touristic practices, with the later stages being characterized by a rejection of the now disparaged status of “tourist”. Hotel clubs are synonymous with mindless mass tourism while unrated hotels are generally patronized by cleverer backpacker and/or adventurer types. The third category is representative of a new generation aspiring to blend in to the point of becoming residents. While mass tourism is plainly associated with a dehumanized economic presence, the wish to adopt the status of resident can be read as a desire to legitimate one’s presence in the country, as well as to show one’s human and sensitive side. However, these changes have not yet managed to expunge from collective representations the figure of the tourist as a dim-witted and ridiculous putz – the “voyage idiot”. The reason for this is that the tourists themselves do not question this representation, especially not those who wish to distance themselves from it. Indeed they use it as a way to promote their own alternative touristic practices, symbolized by the unrated hotel and the Riad Guest House.

Today, tourism is one of the major challenges for many countries and territories. The balance of payments, an ever-increasing number of visitors and the significant development of the tourism offer clearly illustrate the booming trend in this sector. This macro-economic approach is often used by the organizations in charge of tourism, WTO for instance. Quantitative assessments which consider the satisfaction of customers’ needs as an end in itself have prevailed both in tourism development schemes and in prospective approaches since the sixties.

This article addresses the issue of the relationship between national and European dimensions, as overlapping identity structures of Romanian citizenship in the last years. The problem of a European identity became prominent in the context of the recent integration of Romania into the European structures. This paper presents a textual analysis of political platforms concerning European and national identities, as presented on the official sites of Romanian political parties during the 2009 European elections campaign.

One constant idea emerges from all of the studies regarding the relationship between journalists and PR practitioners: this relationship is a complex and ambiguous one. It is quite obvious that both participants aim at holding control over the production and distribution of information; despite this aim, it is certain that none of the two can develop a monopoly over such a process. The inter-dependency between the actors involved in this game is based on the interest in mutual co-operation showed by each of the participants. This very study stands for the fact that by means of the values they referred to, the Romanian journalists and PR professionals express attitudes that are similar to those of their colleagues from other countries where these two professions have a longer tradition behind.

According to the authors of this paper, mass tourism does not generate the development of local communities but rather their devitalization. This paper presents a cross-literature survey on community-based tourism and local community development. It proposes some links between these two approaches and asserts that community-based tourism can be a strategy to trigger local community development. It address the conditions under which the convergence of these two approaches may allow the launching of development initiatives liable to counter the devitalization and impoverishment process which characterizes certain mass tourism oriented places.

Public managers are graduated young people who passed trough an accelerated development program preparing them for careers at the highest levels of the Civil Service. Civil Service fast streamers are exposed to a range of placements in government departments and agencies and they are placed in regularly changing roles of intensive responsibility to prepare them for future senior managerial positions. Methodology: Interviews with major stakeholders took place in order to find out their opinions on the overall impact of public managers on the Romanian Civil Service over the last 3 years. More than 25 senior civil servants and 40 Public Managers were interviewed using both face to face and phone interviews. The research is the more important as the studies on the subject are almost inexistent and it approaches a group of people being in essence, policy advisers, project leaders, experts, liaison and many other job titles all in one. Therefore, it is highly important to understand the challanges and future prospects of those Public Managers as they represent a group of people able to meet the fresh challanges that come from the rapidly changing business and political environment.

For a long time the question of the location of economic activities was reduced to the location of producers, the location of consumers being considered as a variable of secondary importance. However, with the increase of tourism mobilities, people tend to consume outside of the place they are used to living and in the future the presence or the absence of these temporary consumers could be an important stake for local economies. This paper aims at defining theses stakes by measuring these displacements of consumption between French areas.

Saly Portudal resort and Petite Côte are more and more privileged destinations for Europeans and French people, especially elderly. They tend to become permanent resident. They only go back to Europe just to have medical care or to pay visit to their relatives. This inversion of stay durations has a lot of economic and social stakes at a local level.

The Romanian seaside, a magnet for Scandinavian tourists in the past, encounters nowadays difficulties in finding its own place in the regional context of the Black Sea. Despite stagnation in modernising tourism structures, during the months of July and August the coast is full of tourists. The main focus of this survey is to identify the raisons of the tourist choices and the main issues in Romanian coastal tourism.