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.

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.

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 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.

The paper provides insights about perceived problems, available solutions and participants in the researched tourist destinations at the time the choice was taken to establish destination structures. The garbage can model is a useful tool to analyze change in destinations. It explains why and how decisions in complex environments are established, why seemingly rational choices are not taken or taken too late, and it allows including stakeholders and particularly public inter-vention in public-private partnership structures.