The Aldo Papone Endowment, in honour of a former President of American Express, has provided funding to schools from the ten countries, whose Travel & Tourism Programmes are joined together as the GTTP. Each school won its country's competition for the best project on Sports Tourism. Representatives of these schools will present their winning projects, and each school has also prepared a case study on sports tourism which will be posted on our web site, www.gttp.org, so that the 78,000 GTTP students around the world can benefit from this research.

The competition was launched to learners in 10 countries around the world. The participating countries are Brazil, Canada, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Jamaica, Russia, South Africa, the UK, and the USA.

The winning school from each country attends a Global Travel and Tourism Student Conference, where learners are provided with the opportunity to present their case study, and discuss ways of encouraging tourism to their respective countries through sport.

This year the conference is being held in Philadelphia in the USA, and our hosts are the National Academy Foundation (NAF) and the Philadelphia Academy of Travel & Tourism.

Special thanks to South African Tourism for providing the funding for the airline tickets for our learners to travel to Philadelphia to present their case study.

Our Global Partners must also be thanked. These are industry leaders whose continued support makes possible our global educational effort: Amadeus, American Express, British Midland Airways (BMI), Budget Car Rental, Galileo, Hertz, KLM, Lufthansa, and the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC).

Finally, we would like to thank NBI (National Business Initiative), who managed the development of the case study.