Keywords: Balaton, tourism, waterside, destination,

Abstract: Being an iconic destination in Hungary, the Lake Balaton and its surroundings do play a significant role in tourism. Although the area’s recreational history dates back to the 19th century, image has been strongly formed by the mass tourism decades. The tourism trends, among them the restructuring of demand, has brought new challenges for the destination struggling with strong temporal and spatial imbalance of visitor flows. Nowadays, besides the ‘measurable’ tourism, the area offers unforgettable experiences also for non-conventional tourists (e.g. VFR, second home owners, oneday visitors). This article seeks to provide a short overview of the theoretical background of waterside areas as tourism destination, furthermore gives a summary of the current situation.

Abstract: In our globally cosmopolitan world that we are living right now, no matter where we come from, what language we are speaking, what kind of career we have, we all want to improve our lives in hope that it would be continuously becoming better and better. Obviously, it is true that every human-being on earth wants to have a life filled with comfortability and ability to enjoy life events. Through this sentiment a so-called “quality of life” is a key tool which particularly identifies how people live their lives as well as the experience of an individual. Therefore, quality of life is immensely subjective since people define the concept differently based on material, physical, spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and social well-beings. This paper explores the role of social network, sleeping quality and external conditions that might trigger stress in international and native students’ quality of life at a European institution. Furthermore, it studies how these basic elements are connected to each other and it discovers our students’ feelings, experiences and expectations. Based on the primary research structured focus groups interviews were conducted among international students from different countries, especially at bachelor level. The findings suggest that international students’ problems related to their quality of life also have a strong impact on changing the higher education institution. Based on the results we can improve our students’ quality of life, thereby retain them, and ultimately, we will be able to extend student’s lifetime value