Decision making is a significant responsibility for business managers, their decisions impacting business performance. Managers are therefore interested in acquiring and implementing reliable methods for making decisions both now and in the future. Currently, in the countries in the Albanian-speaking regions of the Western Balkans, intuitive decision-making methods predominate. In order to find appropriate methods for assessing and prioritizing goals, new approaches to decision making should be adopted. Various methods have been developed for multi-criteria decision making. One of these is the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method—a method which should receive more attention than it has up to now. We would like to show that the AHP method could be of great use in decision making. Through a case study, this paper explores the AHP, a method with three levels in which the identification of decision-making criteria is based on the perceptions of managers and consumers. The paper’s findings offer an important guide for managers to improve decision making and enhance performance in competitive markets.

Agritourism is a complex activity, a chance maybe today to ensure both human health and the “health” of the environment and rural settlements in order to achieve a most wanted desideratum, the sustainability of the rural environment. The idea of this paper starts from the trend of the current period, meaning the strong emphasis on natural, organic, bio, in all human activities, health and environment, in a word, sustainability. The necessity of implementing the sustainability of activities, health and environment in rural areas, taking into account the agritourism field, was a subject pursued in the study, taking as area of study the mountainous rural environment, the reason of this choice deriving from the fact that the mountain area offers great opportunities for agritourism development, the practice of which is even necessary in the current period. The sustainability of agritourism on rural health and environment cannot be dissociated from the economic, social and cultural life of the community in which it manifests itself, and has a multiplier effect on all the domains with which it interacts. So the purpose of the paper is to follow the development of the agritourism field and, based on some present information, to make a future forecast for some specific indicators, to highlight the representative aspects related to the development and capitalization of guesthouses from a rural mountain environment through agritourism and to come up with a forecast for future transformations that need to take place in the studied area in order to support the sustainable development of the human environment through agritourism.

Sustainability has become a priority in the last decades. If we consider rural regions, agritourism, an activity strongly related to local communities, represents an opportunity to ensure the sustainability of rural settlements and of the environment, and at the same time an innovative and diversifying possibility for the economic support of rural settlements. Many studies have shown that the sustainability trend of the current period can be achieved by combining rural and local resources and traditional products specific to the rural regions with tourist activities, the challenge being the revitalization of rural economy. A large number of Romanian mountain rural regions can provide opportunities for sustaining agritourism activity; some of them may succeed to capitalize on the niche characteristic of agritourism, and through appropriate and effective strategies to move from the pioneering stage to an economically and socially valuable chance for improving the living conditions from rural area and finally to ensure sustainable development of rural communities. This paper begins from the importance of agritourism for rural regions. It aims at identifying the current situation of the agritourism activity in three regions and at developing proposals that are based strictly on the specific needs of the regions. In our opinion, the implementation of these specific actions would represent future challenges and at the same time ways of supporting the sustainable development of agritourism activities and of local settlements.

The destructive impact of cardiovascular diseases on health, including heart failure, peripheral artery disease, atherosclerosis, stroke, and other cardiac pathological conditions, positions these health conditions as leading causes of increased global mortality rates, thereby impacting the human quality of life. The considerable changes in modern lifestyles, including the increase in food intake and the change in eating habits, will unavoidably lead to an unbalanced consumption of essential fatty acids, with a direct effect on cardiovascular health problems. In the last decade, essential fatty acids have become the main focus of scientific research in medical fields aiming to establish their impact for preventing cardiovascular diseases and the associated risk factors. Specifically, polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA), such as omega 3 fatty acids, and monounsaturated fatty acids from various sources are mentioned in the literature as having a cardio-protective role, due to various biological mechanisms that are still to be clarified. This review aims to describe the major biological mechanisms of how diets rich in essential fatty acids, or simply essential fatty acid administration, could have anti-inflammatory, vasodilatory, anti-arrhythmic, antithrombotic, antioxidant, and anti-atherogenic effects. This review describes findings originating from clinical studies in which dietary sources of FAs were tested for their role in mitigating the impact of heart disorders in human health.

The debates regarding sustaining the rural world by improving the quality of life are numerous; one of the proposals being agritourism activity. This activity can be a “smart chance” for the sustainability of the mountain rural environment, because it has a multiplier effect on some important parts of economic and social life of the community. For instance, it can be an ally of agriculture, ensuring a diversification alternative for farms, an alternative for local guesthouses to capitalize their own local products, while ensuring the opportunity to obtain additional/complementary income, a possibility of adjusting the depopulation phenomenon and the abandonment of old houses and lands, at the same time offering a pleasant activity/alternative, especially for young people. In this context, the purpose followed in the paper is oriented through the transposition of agritourism activity into a “smart chance” for ensuring rural mountain sustainability. Being simultaneously an innovative and diversifying alternative, it is an actual one that starts from the study of two areas which are similar in terms of tourist potential. However, the approach is a different one, especially regarding the combination of agricultural resources with those specific to the rural way of life, and it also follows a different degree of development. Our scientific approach aims to present some aspects from the two areas, to achieve a general image of tourism potential, to identify how the agritourism activity is seen by those directly involved in its implementation, to point out some aspects due to which agritourism activity can be considered as a “smart chance” while bringing multiple benefits, and to ensure the sustainability of rural mountain areas by playing a vital role in the transition towards a more sustainable future.

The popularity of rural areas and especially the mountainous ones, as a possibility to spend the vacation has increased in most countries. Almost all mountain areas can provide great opportunities for the development of various forms of rural tourism, there being many examples according to which many mountain areas, through appropriate and effective strategies of capitalizing the resources through the forms of rural tourism, start from the pioneer stage to a real valuable alternative in socio-economic terms for the rural area. One of the concepts that are increasingly used is the “tourist village”, its main issue, consisting in the return of the investment, an aspect that we will discuss in this paper. The paper presents an analysis of the way in which the occupancy degree affects the period of amortization of the initial investment. Concretely, in the case of the medium-sized tourist village, the minimum occupancy degree for the amortization of the initial investment, starts from about 25% for the investment without a loan, but subsidy in proportion of 50% and reaches at about 85% in the case of an investment with loan, for a period of 10 years, without advance or subsidy and with an interest of 7%. Initial investments were established for a holiday village in the Romanian countryside.