Networking Approaches for Sustainable Destination Management

Modern society, recent trends and contemporary lifestyles show a general increase in tourist flows and the growing importance of the tourism industry in many countries throughout the world. Despite this phenomenon, tourism has still proven to be a difficult issue for tourism enterprises to deal with. It almost seems as if the tourism industry is not fully capable of valorising international tourism and its escalating figures, especially the ever-increasing number of people travelling to and from new emerging markets such as East Asia. This may be due to the tourist's profile, which has shown constant changes in the new millennium and to global tourism products, which tend to incorporate a wide variety of goods and services difficultly managed be single actors. Tourists, in fact, usually tend to amass each component offered within tourism in their overall perception rather than rating singular factors since their needs are perceived as a whole. This attitude does not adequately reflect the tourism production system, which is composed of many different actors affecting the singular factors mentioned above. This is the main reason that the global tourism product may be a fashionable and interesting issue when considering demand. It is, however, much harder to deal with taking supply into account as it stimulates the aggregation and collaboration of many actors in specific territorial areas. Hence tourism destination management, enabling systemic governance of territorial areas, is becoming the only means of territorial competitiveness for local stakeholders. Even though this concept is easily comprehensible in theory, it is very hard to carry out since it concern effective cooperation between private and public actors in the tourism industry.Moreover, the application of theoretical models to the tourism industry emphasises how auppliers tend to be highly heterogeneous in terms of technology, clients and functions, and how they are kept togheter only by their common goal of satisfying a particular type of demand connected to the tourism experience of single actors. Therefore, multidimensional models become unsuitable for describing the tourism phenomenon considered as a whole. These considerations explain the difficulties in defining specific managerial trends and common policies in the tourism industry, leading us to our discussion and analysis of sustainable tourism