Tourism system dynamics: a multi-level destination approach

This work tries to depict an interpretation model that unifies the various streams of thought and, at the same time, aims to highlight the relationships amongst them. It is proposed a breaking down of destination in four levels, each of them characterised by its own specificity in terms of problems, interpretation keys, evolutionary dynamics, functioning and governance approaches. The first level is the territorial system, recognised both as a new unit of analysis and as a player that competes against other territories. In particular, in order to gain and maintain a competitive advantage authors underlines two main conditions: on the one hand, the strong contextualization and link with its resources and specificities and, on the other hand, the ability of public and private actors of “working together”. The second level is the tourism system, meant as the network of local actors involved in tourism development, that generates offers capable of creating value for specific market segments. The analysis of networks’ characteristics and the use of two synthetic dimensions - degree of interdependence amongst the system’s stakeholders and degree of governance centralisation - permits to propose a classification of system configurations and distinguish four ideal types of tourism system: market cluster, district, tourism local system and constellation. The third level is the tourism product, meant as a specific combination of resources belonging to the tourism system, directed towards a given market target; it is the tourism product that, through the interaction with clients, determines their perception of the territory, i.e. their global tourism experience. In addition, a recognition of the different views and definitions of tourism product is provided and an analysis of the properties of the different types of products is proposed. The paper ends with the study of the evolutionary dimension, i.e. the process which links together the aforementioned three levels of analysis. Two main processes are recognised: the first, that originates from the platform of local resources and leads to the emergence of a tourism system; the second, that links, through a mutual interaction, the tourism system to the tourism products that it generates.