The selection of papers in this special issue of the TQM Journal come from the presentations made at the 16th Toulon-Verona Conference "Excellence in Services" that was held on the campus of the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, on 29-30 August 2013, honoured by Dr Gregor Virant, Minister of the Interior and of Public administration of Slovenia, and Dr Alex Douglas, Editor of the TQM Journal, as guest keynote speakers. The conference was born in the heart of China in 1997 when Professor Claudio Baccarani and the late Professor Michel Weill came up with the idea of organizing a conference on "quality in higher education" which was becoming a hot issue at the time. They decided to simply call it the "Toulon-Verona Conference" as Professor Baccarani was from Verona in Italy and Professor Weill was from Toulon in France. The Conference has lasted, and is still lasting, longer than their creators would have dreamt of as it is the longest-lasting conference, without interruption, on the topic. The Conference is held in a different university each time and has thus visited Italy four times, France twice, Spain twice, Portugal twice, England, Belgium, Scotland, Greece, Israel and Slovenia once. With time, and the widening scope of quality management, new themes have been added to the Conference over the years: health care, local government, tourism, banking, logistics, to cover today all kinds of services offered to customers and users; hence the adoption of the name "Excellence in Services" for the conference. Since 1998, more 1,000 papers have been presented in the conference.
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