Pietro Beritelli

Overnight taxes are controversial. They affect tourists’ consumption behavior and hotels’ profits. This potentially generates undesirable industry practices such as underreporting overnights to evade overnight taxes. The aim of the paper is to understand the conditions and outcomes of underreporting. This is important because underreporting affects destinations’ tax income, which in turn may have further effects on tourismor other public services.

Recent research underlines the importance of understanding the tourist destination as a demand-driven construct. Visitors activate different configurations of supply elements that produce a complex and dynamic fabric referred to as a space of flows. Today, we have the means to understand how these flows shape the evolution and gestalt of tourist places. This article proposes a new framework combining three concepts and related foundational theories: visitor flows, trajectories, and corridors. In tandem, they describe how tourism manifests itself in space and time. Trip decision, trip execution, and tourist performance unfold through social mechanisms generating the totality of visitor flows. Stakeholders must understand how visitor flows in their destinations emerge and evolve in order to decide on specific design interventions.

Purpose – The need and legitimacy of DMOs are increasingly questioned. Still, the tourism literature provides little advice on how DMOs change and finance their activities for the benefit of their destination given contextual change. This conceptual article, contributes to filling this gap. We do so by proposing a typology of business models for destination management organizations. Design/methodology/approach – With the help of typological reasoning, we develop a new framework of DMO business model ideal types. To this end, we draw on extant literature on business model typologies and identify key dimensions of DMO business models from the tourism literature. Findings – The challenges DMOs face, as discussed in the tourism literature, relate to both ends of its business model: On the one end, the value creation side, the perceived value of the activities they traditionally peruse has been declining; on the other end, the value capture side, revenue streams are less plentiful or attached to more extensive demands. Based on two dimensions, configurational complexity and perceived control, we identify four distinct ideal types of DMO business models: the destination factory, the destination service center, the value orchestrator, and the value enabler. Originality/value – We outline a “traditional” DMO business model that stands in contrast to existing DMO classifications and that relates DMO challenges to the business model concept. The typology provides an integrated description of how DMO business models may be positioned to create and capture value for the organization and the destination(s) is serves. The ideal types point to important interdependencies of specific business model design choices.

Have you ever unexpectedly met someone you already knew in a remote travel destination? Many people have or will at least a couple times in their travel biography. In this article, we theorize how such chance meetings help better understand the socially embedded nature of travel behavior and choice. We validate the underlying assumptions with an exploratory empirical study. By conceptualizing chance meetings and connecting them with social network theory, we get closer to predicting where people precisely travel and what activities they engage in at particular points in time. This socially embedded perspective transcends the importance of attractions and activities as object of reference between traveler and place. Broadly, these findings contribute to the discussion on the social origins of travel and on how choices are taken in travel.

This article communicates the main insights of the third Biennial Forum on Advances in Destination Management (ADM), held in Vail, Colorado (USA). The substance of scholars’ and practitioners’ discussions can be divided into five topical domains: (1) relevance of experiences to the destination concept, (2) destination strategy and resilience, (3) the future of DMOs, (4) tourism taxation and regulation, and (5) big data and visitor management. For each domain, a goal-centered research agenda is offered, built on conference participants’ collective sense-making efforts during the three-day conference, followed by a dedicated consensus session.

Travel decision research still struggles to explain a large portion of the variance in travel choices. We argue that advances in this domain must originate from a shift in the kinds of questions we ask travelers to understand what triggers their decisions. The proposed shift from “Why did you . . . ?” to “How come . . . ?” changes the emphasis from retrospective sense giving to a contextual understanding of travel choice, focusing in particular on the constellations that produce actual travel behavior. This shift opens research avenues of a new theoretical and methodological nature and has fundamental implications for consumer research as well as destination marketing practices.

Purpose The need and legitimacy of destination management organizations (DMOs) are increasingly questioned. Still, the tourism literature provides little advice on how DMOs change and finance their activities for the benefit of their destination-given contextual change. This conceptual article aims to contribute to filling this gap. The authors do so by proposing a typology of business models for destination management organizations. Design/methodology/approach With the help of typological reasoning, the authors develop a new framework of DMO business model ideal types. To this end, the authors draw on extant literature on business model typologies and identify key dimensions of DMO business models from the tourism literature. Findings The challenges DMOs face, as discussed in the tourism literature, relate to both ends of their business model: On the one end, the value creation side, the perceived value of the activities they traditionally pursue has been declining; on the other end, the value capture side, revenue streams are less plentiful or attached to more extensive demands. On the basis of two dimensions, configurational complexity and perceived control, the authors identify four distinct ideal types of DMO business models: the destination factory, destination service center, value orchestrator and value enabler. Originality/value The authors outline a “traditional” DMO business model that stands in contrast to existing DMO classifications and that relates DMO challenges to the business model concept. The typology provides an integrated description of how DMO business models may be positioned to create and capture value for the organization and the destination(s) it serves. The ideal types point to important interdependencies of specific business model design choices.

This paper summarizes the main insights of the second Biennial Forum on Advances in Destination Management (ADM), held in St. Gallen (Switzerland). Issues in five domains preoccupied the discourse of scholars and practitioners alike: (1) the definition of ‘destination', (2) the purpose and legitimacy of destination management organizations (DMO), (3) governance and leadership in destination networks, (4) destination branding, and (5) sustainability. For each domain, this consensus offers a purposeful research agenda grounded in the ADM?s community of destination management and marketing researchers. This paper builds on conference participants? collective sense-making efforts expressed over the course of the conference and in a dedicated consensus session.