During the recent past, passenger air transport has been recovering from its significant retraction during the Covid-19 pandemic. If the recent significant drop in air traffic due to the pandemic acted as an external mitigating factor to airport traffic congestion in several major airports around the world, with the post-pandemic air traffic recovery airport capacity is likely to, once again, fall short of demand and not keep pace with the growth in air traffic. For this reason, close to two hundred major airports worldwide, most of them in Europe, face capacity constraints.

Eurocontrol predicts Europe’s capacity shortage in 2050 at 500,000 flights/year given the baseline scenario, which could rise to 2.7 million based on an optimistic scenario. The allocation of airport slots in Europe and elsewhere is still ruled by administrative processes, based on IATA’s Guidelines, which follow historical precedence and time adjustments of historical slots. Market mechanisms in slot allocation, as an alternative to administrative processes, are controversial and still rarely used. Several authors have highlighted the inefficiency of the current airport slot administrative allocation system, based on those guidelines. Some have suggested improvements within this administrative system, others have suggested new mechanisms altogether, such as congestion pricing mechanisms and other market mechanisms involving auction procedures.

Among the various auction mechanisms, scoring auctions and the Progressive Adaptive User Selection Environment (PAUSE) methodology have been suggested. In this paper, and following our previous work, we explore and extend the application of the PAUSE auction mechanism with bidding based on a score function for the auctioneer, which includes another variable in addition to total revenue, where this variable represents the quality of the service provided. We suggest the application of this auction mechanism, in a gradual fashion, to the three international airports operating in Portugal that are level 3 all year round.

The different airlines using these airports would still follow the current IATA guidelines during their use of other airports, including the slot exchange protocols. We suggest that some of the PAUSE auction mechanism’s desirable properties, such as computability, transparency, absence of envy, and the mitigation of the “price-jump problem”, “threshold problem”, “exposure problem”, and “winner’s curse problem”, still hold.

There is a growing emphasis on sustainability within the hospitality industry. However, research on hyper-local restaurants’ strategic sustainable strategies is scarce. Accordingly, this study aims to unveil the hyper-local Chinese restaurateurs’ critical success factors (CSFs). Grounded on the CSFs identified in the literature and validated by experts, data were collected from hyper-local restaurant owners and analysed through multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM), best–worst method (BWM) and hesitant fuzzy shapely order weights average (HSFOWA) approach. Results suggest that green entrepreneurial orientation is symbiotic, and green customer education, ability, motivation, capability, entrepreneurial orientation and high-commitment work practices significantly impact the sustainability of hyper-local restaurants. Findings stimulate sustainable strategies based on available CSFs. Practical and managerial implications are discussed.

This paper estimates the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the economic and financial performance of the Portuguese mainland hotel industry. For that purpose, we implement a novel empirical approach to gauge the impact of the pandemic during the 2020–2021 period in terms of the industry’s aggregated operating revenues, net total assets, net total debt, generated cash flow, and financial slack. To that end, we derive and estimate a sustainable growth model to project the 2020 and 2021 ‘Covid-free’ aggregated financial statements of a representative Portuguese mainland hotel industry sample. The impact of the Covid pandemic is measured by the difference between the ‘Covid-free’ financial statements and the historical data drawn from the Orbis and Sabi databases. An MC simulation with bootstrapping indicates that the deviations of the deterministic from the stochastic estimates for major indicators vary between 0.5 and 5.5%. The deterministic operating cash flow estimate lies within plus or minus two standard deviations from the mean interval of the operating cash flow distribution. Based on this distribution, we estimate the downside risk, measured by cash flow at risk, at 1294 million euros. Overall findings shed some light on the economic and financial repercussions of extreme events such as the Covid-19 pandemic, providing us with a better understanding of how to design public policies and business strategies to recover from such an impact.

This study aims to validate a scale to measure addiction to social media (SMAS) for the Portuguese population (SMAS-PV). The original 14 items’ SMAS was translated and back-translated from English to Portuguese. Psychometric scale validation procedures were followed. SMAS-PV’s properties were assessed in a sample of 605 Portuguese university and high-school students. A Parallel Analysis was carried out as a criterion for extracting factors in Exploratory Factorial Analysis (EFA), EFA for ordinal data, with unweighted least squares (ULS). This was followed by confirmatory factor analysis to examine whether the structure pattern fitted the Portuguese context. The resulting scale, with eight items in a two-component structure, compulsive feelings, and social consequences, demonstrated high reliability and validity. The Portuguese version of the social media addiction scale presented good psychometric qualities, constituting a credible instrument for assessing social media addiction. Participants with the highest addiction levels spend more time connected to social media.

In the context of a lack of quantitative research approaching an engineering education in sustainability, this cross-sectional study aims to investigate whether efforts to promote sustainability education contribute to shaping the beliefs, attitudes, and intentions towards sustainability in a sample of Portuguese engineering schools students; in addition, this study investigates whether emotional intelligence impacts the students’ motivation to learn more about sustainability and whether it plays a role in moderating the relationships between those variables. A survey was carried out on a sample of 184 students from two major Portuguese engineering schools. A model was found showing that beliefs, attitudes, and gender are predictors of students’ intentions towards sustainability, explaining 62.6% of its variance. Furthermore, the findings reveal that women have stronger beliefs and intentions towards sustainability than men and that students with higher emotional intelligence are more motivated to learn more about sustainability. In addition, emotional intelligence has a negative and significant moderating impact on the relationship between attitudes and students’ intentions towards sustainability, being stronger for lower levels of emotional intelligence and having a similar, yet non-significant, effect on the relationship between beliefs and students’ intentions towards sustainability. The results suggest that emotional intelligence should be considered a competence and a tool in engineering education in order to enhance students’ inclination towards sustainable development.