Despite the antiquity of the study of issues related to arbitration, it is almost astonishing to note the relative absence of scientifc studies relating arbitration to business. This fact, we believe, is often due to excessive conservatism in the law world, which claims for itself the study of what it understands to be legal and does not admit interaction with other areas of knowledge, and also to the corresponding difculty for other sciences or areas of knowledge to use law to establish and study empirically supported relationships, as they come up against a single methodology specifc to legal science, which most often hinders multidisciplinary analyses that include it. A good example of this is the fact that it is relatively easier to fnd studies related to arbitration and mediation in the area of psychology, where they seek to understand the motivations and the efects of certain stimuli in this area, than in the areas of management or economics. Bearing in mind everything that has been said so far, the importance of arbitrage for the company is almost obvious. For what particularly concerns us, the tourism company operates in a tourism market, seeking to maximise its proft through a correct analysis and use of business variables. It happens, therefore, that litigation is one of the variables present in any economic exploitation. In efect, the web of relationships that is generated for any company to be able to succeed and assert itself in a given market is of such a scale that, almost inevitably, litigation appears. It may be a small, almost inconsequential dispute, but it may also be a serious problem requiring the intervention of a third party to resolve it. In a state governed by the rule of law, such as ours and those around us, the natural external intervention falls to the courts, with all the limitations already listed above. Perhaps the most penalising for the company is the length of the processes which, more often than not, always produce unfair decisions because they are extremely slow. And, when we introduce the variable of confrontation between two or more legal systems, the problems become even more critical. Arbitration then appears to be the easiest way to a swift decision which, for this reason alone, will be more just and efcient than any other, and also because, in arbitration the specialised technical competence of the arbitrators in a given matter can be safeguarded. Competitiveness, as far as we are concerned, is a concept of comparison of the capacities and performance of a given company with another company, of a sector of activity with another sector of activity, of a tourist destination with another tourist destination or even of a country with another country. The concept of performance refers us, in turn, to a comparison between the results achieved and the results expected to be achieved. Here, as can be easily understood, we are within an organisation and unrelated to other organisations. This comparison will necessarily require the presence of monitoring processes of these results that allow their measurement. The performance and competitiveness in tourism have been widely studied, both in terms of tour operators and tourist destinations themselves. We do not intend to establish relationships between international arbitration and the competitiveness of the tourist destination. We intend only to evaluate the efects on the performance and competitiveness of the tourism company, be it a travel agency, a tour operator or a hotel, of the institutionalised and generalised use of arbitration as an alternative method of dispute resolution. We will ask, therefore, and in the 10
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