Conference Venue

Budapest Metropolitan University of Applied Sciences Budapest Metropolitan University of Applied Sciences is the biggest private University in Hungary and was established fifteen years ago. It has a large community of close to 8,000 students. Budapest Metropolitan offers complex educational programmes including Master degree programmes and Post-graduate specialist training programmes which build on the Bachelor programmes in the field of Communication, Business, Tourism and Arts. Our connections with companies in the private sector are already one of the widest and we are working on increasing the breadth and scope of these relationships to further help our students and graduates in professional development and successful placement. Budapest Metropolitan graduates find job placement within an average 2.1 months after graduation, which is the best figure of all Hungarian institutions. One third of graduates are hired full-time at the company where they completed their internship. We have four campuses in Budapest. The Conference will take place on the Main Campus (H-1148 Budapest, Nagy Lajos Király útja 1-9). There are two buildings here with 3,054 and 2,642 m2 educational space. In the two buildings there are altogether five auditoria and 32 classrooms. Many of the classrooms are specialised for a purpose, such as informatics, consultation, communication, tourism, marketing or media. The central library is in the main campus as well (27,000 available books and documents). The Conference will be co-organised and hosted by the School of Tourism, Leisure and Hospitality which is located on the main campus. The Department has eight full- time staff and many part-time and visiting lecturers, many of whom are leading industry representatives. There are currently more than eight hundred students studying on Tourism, Hospitality or Events Management BA and MA programmes in both Hungarian and English. This includes a BA Tourism specialism in Health Tourism (the first in Hungary to offer this specialism) and an MA Programme in Thermal Spa and Resort Management (the first of its kind in the world), subject which link closely to the main themes of the Conference. The staff in the School of Tourism, Leisure and Hospitality have taken part in many national and international research projects, especially in health, spa, wellness tourism and hospitality. The latest of these was a two and a half year project which researched levels of wellbeing and implications for health tourism in eleven Balkan countries (see http://www.metropolitan.hu/rolunk/1520/balkan-wellbeing-and-health- tourism-study.html). The co-Chairs of the Conference Melanie Smith and László Puczkó have been actively involved in educational, research and consultancy projects in the field of health tourism for the past fifteen years (see Organising Committee).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The event is an continuation of and was initiated by the research financed under the Research and Technology Innovation Fund (KTIA_AIK_12-1-2013-0043) called Adaptation and ICT-supported development opportunities of regional wellbeing and wellness concepts to the Balkans.