ABSTRACT
Tourism is a complex socioeconomic phenomenon based on the growing needs of modem societies for recreation and leisure and has become a major economic activity worldwide and a priority field in policy making at local, regional, national, supranational and international level. It is the result - and a cause - of wide sweeping changes in modem societies with far-reaching consequences for both developed and developing economies (Vellas, 2002). Its spatial extent, in the past involving a few world regions, is becoming increasingly global reaching even far distant places.
