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The first thematic workshop on «Strategic Importance of Tourism as a Part of an Integrated Development Strategy of Countries and Places» showed that strategic importance of tourism varies according to its economic weight and political actuality. In many countries the economic importance of tourism is relatively low and tourism goals are not high on the political agenda. Nevertheless, even in such countries, tourism can be important economic activity for some less developed places (regions).

This article attempts to analyse social relations between tourists and the inhabitants of tourism regions in Greece, from 1960 to the present. The introduction describes the special characteristics of the regions concerned by the analysis, and the parameters of greatest importance to the analysis framework. The analysis itself discusses two periods in detail. The first period (1960–80) covers what is historically considered Greece's first stage of tourism development. The second (1980–98) discusses the basis for the subsequent transition to industrialised mass tourism. In its conclusions the article sums up the main characteristics and peculiarities of communication between tourists and the local population in a country as dependent on tourism as Greece.

In many tourism country destinations the dominant structure is that of small‐to‐medium enterprises (SMEs). They are prevalent for example in the hotel trade, travel agencies, tourism transport systems and the many tourism‐related attractions. In contrary, in new destinations in emerging economies and developing countries that have strong tourism sectors the big corporations and chains are particularly well represented. Each of these sectors — the big corporations and the chains that operate on an industrial scale on the one hand, and the smaller type of business on the other — has its own characteristic structural advantages and disadvantages.

This paper aims to consider numerical analysis of laminar double-diffusive natural convection inside a non-homogeneous closed medium composed of a saturated porous matrix and a clear binary fluid under spatial sinusoidal heating/cooling on one side wall and uniform salting.

The domain of interest is a partially square porous enclosure with sinusoidal wall heating and cooling. The fluid flow, heat and mass transfer dimensionless governing equations associated with the corresponding boundary conditions are discretized using the finite volume method. The resulting algebraic equations are solved by an in-house FORTRAN code and the SIMPLE algorithm to handle the non-linear character of conservation equations. The validity of the in-house FORTRAN code is checked by comparing the current results with previously published experimental and numerical works. The effect of the porous layer thickness, the spatial frequency of heating and cooling, the Darcy number, the Rayleigh number and the porous to fluid thermal conductivity ratio is analyzed.

The results demonstrate that for high values of the spatial frequency of heating and cooling (f = 7), temperature contours show periodic variations with positive and negative values providing higher temperature gradient near the thermally active wall. In this case, the temperature variation is mainly in the porous layer, while the temperature of the clear fluid region is practically the same as that imposed on the left vertical wall. This aspect can have a beneficial impact on thermal insulation. Besides, the porous to fluid thermal conductivity ratio, Rk, has practically no effect on Shhot wall, contrary to Nuinterface where a strong increase is observed as Rk is increased from 0.1 to 100, and much heat transfer from the hot wall to the clear fluid via the porous media is obtained.

The findings are useful for devices working on double-diffusive natural convection inside non-homogenous cavities.

The authors believe that the presented results are original and have not been published elsewhere.