Welcome To The Sport Tourism Conference STC’14

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The Sport Tourism Conference (STC’14) is a joint organization between Coimbra College of Education (ESEC), and the International Research Network In Sports Tourism (IRNIST).

This year's conference will be held in Coimbra, Portugal, from 10th-12th December 2014, at Coimbra College of Education, in the Central Region of Portugal. This scientific event is the 2nd edition of a series of conferences about Sport Tourism, developed in the scope of IRNIST. The 1st Sport Tourism Conference took place in Lille (France) last December.

STC’14 wants to get together researchers, professors, students and professionals who are interested in the Sport Tourism topics. It aims to stimulate research and the dissemination of scientific knowledge, providing a platform to increase inter-disciplinary discussions and comparative approaches, enhancing knowledge and experience while promoting scholarly cooperation and collaborative work among researchers from all over the world.

STC’14 focuses on a wide variety of topics related to Sport Tourism studies within the theme of “Sport Tourism: New Challenges in a Globalized World”. With this broad theme, we intend to discuss the challenges that globalization has brought to Sport Tourism, considering its opportunities as well the threats. We are also interested in linking academic studies to real market needs. The subtopics that we suggest in STC’14 are directly linked with this idea: policies, development studies and sustainability studies towards increasing positive and reducing or eliminating negative impacts; innovation, competitiveness studies, management studies, and event studies, to improve organizations and management best practices; market approaches to suit offer and demand; analysis of new trends to understand the tendencies of the market and to project new research problems and new research lines; but also to look back to the history of Sport Tourism history as a way of predicting the future.

Considering the importance of the dissemination of the work produced, we are very committed in publishing all the papers accepted and presented in STC'14, in the conference proceeding e-book (with ISBN: 978-989-98016-4-6), and abstracts in the abstracts book (ISBN: 978-989-98016-3-9), assuring high quality standards through a refereeing process, made by our scientific commission (specialists in the different topics of the conference). Moreover, we are very dedicated in publishing suitable papers in different formats, as books in international publishers, and special editions in international journals with reference for the presented topics.