It is natural for someone looking in on a foreign culture from the outside to interpret what they see and frame their reactions based on their own background and assumptions. With cultures as a different as those of the Middle East and the West, the potential for blunders increases dramatically, made worse by the high political, diplomatic, military, and commercial stakes involved. Leadership culture in this region has been shaped over centuries through a variety of factors, such as reputation, family, and religion, which continue to influence decision making. The present study posits that an understanding of these factors and how they work is crucial for intelligence analysts, policy and decision makers, strategists, and scholars who must find their way through a very unfamiliar cultural landscape in the Middle East. It is hoped that this discussion will in some way assist in the creation of more effective interaction, policies, and analysis associated with the Middle East.
This article examines a typical dilemma that vexes hospitality private equity investors: Is the critical current situation an opportunity or a threat? To be able to resolve this conundrum, the author analyzes the stepping-stones of the private equity investment process: understanding what was behind the tourism sector crisis and the key requirements for finding suitable solutions; analyzing, at a later stage, the valuation process; and providing recommendations to undertake profitable investments in a distressed hospitality sector.
Starting at years 2010 and 2011, the Arab Spring uprisings altered the landscape of the Mediterranean region. Domestic and external shocks mixed together to worsen the socio-economic situation of many countries in the area. In this context, the tourism industry has shown an important degree of resilience. In Southern Mediterranean European countries remarkable growth of tourism revenues helped to balance the impact of the global financial crisis. In contrast, in the south shore of the Mediterranean, the North of Africa region, the growing instability have resulted in a dramatic drop in the number of international visitors, exacerbating the impact of the global crisis for countries highly dependent on tourism receipts. The first chapter of this research project presents a brief overview on the performance of the tourism industry in the Mediterranean region in recent years. Egypt and Spain are taken as reference case studies, helping to illustrate the way followed by the tourism and hospitality industry since the beginning of the transition process. In the second chapter we propose a marketing mix model in order to improve the conditions of workers and efficiency of the hospitality industry in the transition process, testing the model for the Egyptian case. In the third chapter we provide evidence on changes taking place in the profile of tourists arriving to Spain as our case of analysis, and investigate how these changes have been affecting the level of expenditure and economic sustainability for the tourism sector from a microeconomic perspective.