Tourism Local Systems and Networking

Luciana Lazzeretti, Clara S Petrillo, Luciana Lazzeretti, Clara S Petrillo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781136353208
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

This book focuses on the role of networking, cooperation and partnership in destination management in response to the changing environment of the tourism industry. Firms and institutions are nowadays required to implement drastic management changes: they must adopt a systemic approach and become actively involved in formal and informal networks in order to increase efficiency and product quality, to gain a sustainable edge and face the competitive context. The work is dedicated to deepening the topics of the "Networking and Tourism Local System" session of the 12th ATLAS 2004 Annual Conference, "Networking & Partnership in Destination Development & Management", held in Naples. From a theoretical point of view, the papers included herein relate to two macro reference areas: applied economics and managerial sciences. The analysis range from national to local levels and focus on strategies, policies, and project experiences. Several cases from different areas (Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Malaysia, Portugal, Spain, Sweden) are examined and provide features and issues that can be applied beyond the cultural and economic contexts.

PART 1

TOURISM LOCAL SYSTEMS: ECONOMICS
APPROACHES

Chapter 1

Systemic Approaches for the Analysis of
Tourism Destination: Towards the Tourist
Local Systems

Francesco Capone

Introduction

The aim of this paper is to outline a review of systemic approaches to analyse tourism destination, with a specific view to the analytical models of a “site viewed as a system of actors”. Multi-disciplinary approaches will be reviewed dividing them into management approaches and industrial economics approaches, outlining their various characteristics and specificities at Italian and international level. A general model to analyse a tourism destination, i.e. the tourism local system (TLS) will then be suggested.

This paper is divided into five sections. The first section includes a review of contributions to management approaches (Destination Management (DM), SLOT). The second section illustrates the approaches generated by industrial economics and applied to the tourism industry (cluster, milieu and district). The third section illustrates a model drawn from the “industrial district theory”, the TLS, as a clue to interpret the system of actors specialized in tourist activities. The fourth section deals with a recently issued Italian law on local tourism systems (LTS) and highlights the differences between the framework proposed and the one introduced by an Italian law. Lastly, some conclusions are drawn.

Systemic Approaches to Tourism Destinations Developed by Management Science: Destination Management and Local System Tourism Offer

Destination Management

The systemic approach to a tourism destination is not unique. Within this context, a number of authors (Franch, 2002) differentiate the managerial approach to a destination from the supply side (SLOT) and the demand side (DM). From the demand side, a destination is defined as a whole set of products and services acting as attractions for tourists, while from the supply side it is identified as a correlated system of offers related to a specific site, differentiating it from the tourism product (Franch, 2002, p. 3).

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Tourism Local Systems and Networking
Copyright © 2006 by Elsevier Ltd.
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved
ISBN: 0-08-044938-7

What is a tourism destination? The European Commission (2000) defines a Tourism Destination as:

an area which is separately identified and promoted to tourists as a place to visit, and within which the tourism product is coordinated by one or more identifiable authorities or organizations (p. 149).

The European Commission (EC) stresses the importance of the tourist's perception of the locality and the need for a systemic approach to management and quality:

As far as tourists are concerned, however, the satisfaction derived from staying at a destination does not just depend on their experience of tourism services, but also on more general factors such as hospitality, safety and security, sanitation and salubrity, traffic and visitor management (ibidem, p. 13).

Based upon this definition, in the past 10 years, the international specialized literature coined the concept of “Destination Management”. Following this view, the attention focuses on the strategies and marketing actions implemented in a specific site considered as a system of players co-operating to supply an integrated tourism product.

The concept of DM and Marketing, which analyses a tourism site as a unique system of players located in a specific area, was originally developed by Ritchie, Laws and Buhalis and by International Association of Scientific Experts in Tourism (AIEST)¹ members, Bieger, Keller, Pechlaner, Weiermair among others. Specifically, Pechlaner and Weiermair (2000) make a detailed analysis of a destination with a specific view to destination management, financing tools, organization development and need for competencies and development of marketing strategies. Bieger (1998, p. 7) defines a destination as “as an area consisting of all services and offers provided to a tourism consumers during his/her stay”. As already mentioned, this approach mainly focuses on the demand side; the destination is then viewed as a mix of products capable of attracting a given number of visitors.

From this perspective, the tourism destination is viewed as a bundle of products (the final experience) supplied by a wide number of co-operating players (tour operators, travel agents, passenger carriers, hotels and other service providers), and the competitive advantage of the filière is increasingly depending on the system of local actors. A destination is described as a place characterized by two key elements: its internal reality — i.e. a territorially coherent geographical space where players co-operate — and the external perception of it, which is founded on its image, i.e. its significance for tourists. Although tourism is defined as a heterogeneous mix of services (Crouch & Ritchie, 1999) from the consumers’ point of view, it is no longer a service or a product, but an experience (Otto & Ritchie, 1996).

Systemic literature on tourism also refers to the whole set of relations among local actors resorting to the concept of “coo-petition” (Edgell & Haenisch, 1995), namely co-operation and com-petition. Therefore, emphasis is placed on the role of these two forces, which are crucial for a tourism destination, like for any other territorial model (district or cluster). Such a theoretical similarity to territorial models is also underlined by Crouch and Ritchie (1999), who introduce the well-known Porterian “five forces model” to analyse competitiveness in a tourism site,² and represent it as a prototype of the tourism cluster.

A similar study was carried out by Buhalis (2000), who examined a destination as a combination of tourism products providing the consumer with an integrated experience. The author also emphasized the local actors interdependence and showed how the offer system depends on every single player involved. Buhalis and Cooper (1998) highlighted instead the small and medium size of the enterprises performing their business in the tourism industry.

Attention was paid to the relationships between the DM approach and the ones typical of Italian scholars, particularly the SLOT model (illustrated in the next section) (Tamma, 1999; Franch, 2002). Specifically, a number of Italian authors (Franch, 2002, p. 2) deal with three main issues. The first issue relates to the definition of destination as a target area for government strategic choices and tourism policies. The second issue deals with multiple destination management forms and mainly relates to the co-ordination of the decision-making process, regardless whether it refers to the analysis of the segments to be attracted or to the composition of the local offer. The last issue relates to the policies alternative to destination management; it focuses on how to develop a decision-making process shared by local actors, social community.

From this perspective, Franch (2002, p. 7) maintains that these problems can be addressed as follows: identifying a body capable of analysing and orienting the behaviour of the destination area; having a public organization capable of co-operating with the local stakeholders; and, lastly, self-regulating the actors involved in order to pursue shared objective for the area development.

Slot

In the past 10 years, the Italian literature on travel and tourism industry has widely accepted the systemic approach, mainly referring to the studies by Rispoli and Tamma and to the SLOT concept . The systemic approach applied to a tourism destination analyses the attraction factors and the whole set of local activities. A strong emphasis is put on the relations between what is supplied by the firms and the total offer provided by a specific site, which overtly relates to the definition of SLOT, that is:

a bundle of activities and factors of attractiveness situated in a specific place (site, locality, destination) [which] can provide a well-constructed and integrated tourism offer, that represents a distinctive system of tourism hospitality enhancing local resources and culture (Rispoli & Tamma, 1995, p. 41).

SLOT is characterized by the four following fundamentals (Ibidem, 1995, p. 41):

(a) The system: a bundle of integrated activities rooted in the territory and requiring co-ordination and involvement of all stakeholders;

(b) The local: the reference being made to a specific area that determines the fundamental and peculiar characteristics representing a local attraction;

(c) The tourist offer: the aim of the system is to provide a wide range of tourism products.

(d) The local system of offer: it defines the area as a system open to relations with the external world.

These factors are the pillars, which enable us to evaluate the capability of a specific area of producing wealth and employment opportunities, and setting up a virtuous circle of local development. They also are a common foundation to analyse the industrial economic models extended to the tourism industry.

Both the models illustrated herein (DM and SLOT), while including different factors, emphasize the role of local players, their relations with local resources and the interaction of the local system with the external environment.³

A branch of specialized literature focused on systemic approaches to tourism industry starting from the SLOT definition (Casarin, 1996; Tamma, 1999). For example, Casarin (1996) emphasizes some crucial aspects of the TLS, such as direct management of the territory by local stakeholders, through their participation in the decision-making process aimed at promoting local development.

Tamma (1999) generally refers to DM allowing for two correlated aspects; firstly, the management of the tourism products supplied to the market place; secondly, the resources, activities and players making up the local supply system. The author highlights that DM is the attempt of promoting and organizing the integration of the resources of a specific area to provide a distinctive, sustainable and competitive tourism offer. As the literature includes many system approaches (Laws, 1995; Leiper, 1995), the aim is to give a “collective dimension to the strategies and actions implemented by the individual actors performing their activity in tourism, so as to identify potential decision-making centers, tools, processes” (Tamma, 2002, p. 21). The systemic approach to tourism sites has been widely accepted, and its influence was also recognized by the new Italian Law (L. 135/2001) on LTS (see next section). To analyse the systemic approaches from the industrial organization perspective focusing on the supply side, it is now necessary to refer to other disciplines and analyse the territorial models applied to tourism industry, such as tourism cluster, district and milieu.

Territorial Models Developed by Industrial Economics

Tourism Milieu

Illustrating the approaches developed by industrial economics, we analyse for the first time the social reality of the destination and the role played by the local community. This approach is mainly focused on these points and on the milieu innovateur.⁴ The concept of milieu comes from the French and Swiss literature; original contributions were developed by Aydalot in the 1980s (Aydalot, 1986), and recently by the GREMI⁵ group: Maillat, Crevoisier and Camagni among others. Some scholars of the GREMI group tried to apply the territorial model to other sectors, for instance to the cultural (Costa, 2004) and tourism (Peyrache-Gadeau, 2003) sectors.

The latter contribution analyses the development of mountain sites using a model characterized as a social-economic milieu with a tourism vocation. In this research, two typologies of skiing resorts are described: the “territory-resort of tourism economy” and the “place-resort of tourism production”. The first typology is characterized by a spontaneous local milieu, where innovations spread smoothly and organizations develop in continuity with the past. In the second typology there is no milieu innovateur, but the actor's origin is exogenous and development is merely based on tourism, which is often in conflict with the place's history. This paper also explains the important role played by the local community and the relationships among local players. Making reference to this taxonomy, the authors distinguish resort sites by their different development paths followed in the past few years.

The theory of milieu innovateur mainly focuses on the role of an innovative social-economic environment and on the ability to create a virtuous circle of development, with a strong emphasis on the relations between productive organizations and social communities. Some studies with a similar background were also developed in the Italian literature, but they generally extend the idea of milieu without identifying a definition of the concept specifically related to the tourism sector.⁶

Tourism Cluster

The renewed interest in industrial clusters was initiated by Michael Porter's studies.⁷ Porter maintains that in a globalized economy increasingly competitive advantages are rooted in local systems and in specific places. In The Competitive Advantage ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Halftitle
• ADVANCES IN TOURISM RESEARCH
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Contributors
• Preface
• A Short Overview
• Part 1 Tourism Local Systems: Economics Approaches
• Part 2 Tourism Local Systems: Management Approaches
• Author Index
• Subject Index