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.

The term "getting visitors" is a colloquial expression of the assumption that tourist organizations of all sorts (DMOs) (Destination Marketing/Management Organizations) can attract new or additional visitors to a destination especially by using communication tools. In this article, we use well-founded scientific studies, critical reasoning, and practical considerations to argue that this assumption rarely holds. Eleven selected myths surrounding the practice of DMOs are critically examined and characterized as a cargo cult. It turns out that huge effort is put into creating extremely little added value in terms of additional visitors. The consequences, especially for today's "marketing-oriented" DMOs, are far-reaching. DMOs still have legitimacy. But this must be based on the original rationale behind DMOs, specifically as a solution to instances of market failure in public spaces.

Most state-of-the-art approaches for the analysis of the process of travel decision-making follow Woodworth’s neo-behaviouristic S–R (stimulus–response) or S–O–R (stimulus–organism–response) model. However, within this model, scholars primarily focus on the S–R relationship, investigating specific decisions by describing or explaining an outcome as the result of an input of several stimuli. There is a lack of investigation into the “O” dimension of the S–O–R model. This paper aims to contribute towards closing of this gap by conceptually and holistically expanding existing models with new perspectives and components.

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.

Tourism is a key industry that creates better futures in many countries of the world, both socially and economically. Conducting rigorous and relevant research that develops knowledge and informs stakeholders (including businesses, policy makers, regulators, non-governmental agencies and the general public, just to name a few) on how to improve their practices is therefore of critical importance. Indeed, hundreds of researchers across the globe conduct tourism-related research. The number of researchers continues to increase with more countries joining the international tourism research community. For their work, they have available an ever-increasing number of academic publication outlets. According to Bob McKercher, we currently count more than 250 tourism and hospitality journals. In their workplaces, researchers are increasingly faced with expectations relating to the number of manuscripts they should be publishing per annum, the quality of the journals they should be publishing in and the number of citations their work should be generating. These academic performance indicators, however, encourage outputs that are often of limited use to tourism stakeholders outside of academia and are therefore only acknowledged within a very small community.

Tourist destination branding has become a major element in tourism marketing. However, it could potentially be the case that tourists are unaware of brands intentionally constructed by destination marketing organzations (DMOs) because they do not even recognize the main identifier as represented by the destination logo. This paper tests the truth of this assumption for the cases of four supposedly well-branded Swiss destinations. The results show that destination logo recognition is, indeed, very limited. In addition, destination logos appear to be most effective when used for specifically branding the place right on the spot. In terms of the original meaning and aim of ‘branding,’ the results imply that branding (using the logo) is primarily useful for the product (i.e. the experience) in the destination rather than for destination communication. Since DMOs spend considerable amounts of money in branding processes, we conclude that the impact of branded communication and advertising campaigns is greatly overestimated.

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.

This study challenges the way the research community has approached issues and implemented concepts in the field of destination management. In contrast to previous contributions that deliver a particular framework, this study aims to literally deframe the construct of the destination. To this end, we propose an alternative and dynamic viewpoint for researches and practitioners that might have evolved decades ago, if the research community had not tried to constrain or reduce the pheomenon of the destination to a comprehensive and inherently static system. We identify the main problems of destination management and attempt to explain the reason for the many failures and shortcomings in practice. Building on an alternative concept, we present its applicability to the case of the durrently ongoing reform of the destination management organizations (DMOs) in Switzerland. The study has a conceptual character, although its practical relevance has been proved over the past two years.

Research on the composition of the board of directors of DMO's as well as the governance of DMOs is of particular interest for destination management, because it helps understand the context of community-type tourist destinations. There is an increasing body of research on the composition and roles of DMO boards of directors as well as the duties and tasks of those individuals. However, to date, no study has addressed their influence on the financial revenues of the organizations and the institutions in the destinations. Thus, we investigate to what extent directors on the boards affect the amount from different revenue sources. Using data from 44 Swiss local and regional DMOs, we perform seven distinct multiple regressions with the following revenue sources as dependent variables: (1) membership fees, (2) partnership platforms/initiatives, (3) commercial revenues, (4) overnight taxes, (5) regional and state subsidies, (6) municipal susidies, and (7) tourism taxes. Four independent variables (1) stakeholders, (2) public agents, (3) leaders, and (4) networkers, positively and negatively affect the revenue sources. The results reveal two contrasting roles: while leaders and networkers likely increase the revenue sources, stakeholder representatives and public agents negatively affect the revenue sources. Additionally, the latter two functions strongly increase the size of the DMO's boards. We conclude with a new perspective on how to understand DMO boards, their functions, and finally the organizations themselves.