Pietro Beritelli

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.

This paper summarizes the major outsomes of the first Biannual Forum on Advances in Destination Management, held in St. Gallen (Switzerland) over 6-8 June 2012. The summaries cover four discussion domains: (1) the definition and delimitation of destination management; (2) destination marketing and competitiveness; (3) sustainable destination development and governance, and (4) the implications that these concepts have for destination management in practice, as well as for potential research.

Mobile business applications in tourism have been developed in the last years for various platforms and services. However, most of the applications have been tested in lab-like conditions. The article describes the trial case of St. Moritz, Switzerland. With the help of the Destination-Pilot acceptability, usability, and market potential for mobile information services have been tested in a real environment situation. The trial involves numerous visitors and tourist enterprises. The paper presents opportunities and limitations to so called mobile travel recommender systems. Strong emphasis is put on the methodical and technical challenges in the set up trial phase as well as on potential business models for exploitation.

The practicalities of destination management present daunting challenges. We introduce «The Visitor Flow Approach» as a way to deal with those challenges. This practical approach to destination management is an example of how research on destination management can bridge the divide between insights and impact despite theorizing tourism as a complex social phenomenon. Specifically, we illustrate how Swisscontact, a development agency, blends the theory of flow-based destination management and the six–step method of the St. Gallen Model for Destination Management to create real impact in emerging and developing countries. We present their experiences and lessons learned from four specific contexts (Laos, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Indonesia) and additional applications across four continents.

For actors in a tourism destination, the atmospheric turn initially means looking at themselves in a more holistic and differentiated way. Through the analysis of strategic visitor flows, it is possible to identify subspaces with high frequency, which thus become identification spaces of a destination. Together with other identification fields, they shape the destination brand understood as spatial and atmospheric entity. This enables a different view of a destination, its structure and generates new opportunities for destination management, which wll be discussed in the form of an outlook. A destination manager, for example, could in the future collaborate with governmental bodies responsible for spatial planning and with private builders on spatial design projects and introduce the perspective of the destination as a branded space.

Aim of research: Community type of tourist destinations face the challenge of being characterized by a highly fragmented offer, by a complex interlocking of public institutions and private enterprises and by numerous, often contrasting stakeholder interests. Consequently, destination planning and management becomes a rather difficult process and destination development policies and strategies regularly fail or experience considerable setbacks during the implementation. Recent research under the term 'destination governance' attempts to understand which norms, rules and routines prevail in tourist destination communities, in order to better steer and 'govern' the processes of planning, implementing and controlling for the whole place. Methodology: In this paper, the author first presents the logical and historical devel-opment of the state-of-the art in destination planning and management as well as the recent research field of destination governance. The traditional methodological approaches based on qualitative case studies and looking at institutions and stakeholder groups in a rather comprehensive perspective, have proven to be limited in scope. Not only there is a lack of empirical measurement for the postulated mechanisms in destination governance research. Also, most case studies presented in the literature are limited to descriptive reconstructions of events and processes which eventually conclude with the indication that every destination is particular and every case must be seen as 'culturally' specific. In order to bring forward the knowledge of destination governance and thus to understand which mechanisms affect destination management and planning processes, the author proposes to change the research agenda. In this paper, he presents his research work on destination governance based on (1) quantitative social network analysis, which complements the traditional qualitative case study approach, and (2) individuals, connected to each other in elite networks, as opposed to the previous perspective of institutions and stakeholder groups. Findings: His results lead to the differentiation between explicit governance (i.e. legal framework, institutional roles, stakeholder interests, etc.) and implicit govern-ance (multiple relationships funded on interdependencies, communication, trust, consensus, etc.). Particularly the latter ones are the reason for the success or fail-ure of collective policies and actions. Additionally, the results reveal that across various cases, mainly in the Alpine re-gions, there are on one side aspects typically referring to communities of individuals (e.g. closure and openness, interdependencies, communication, trust, consensus). Yet, on the other side we clearly recognize features attributed to organizations (e.g. hierarchy, influence, knowledge, expertise). Independently from these two perspec-tives, it is the overall implicit governance that affects the formation of interest groups, of formalized routines and eventually of many locally developed elements of the ex-plicit governance. The latter consists of the role of institutions (e.g. municipality, DMO) and of organizations as well as the creation of laws and rules. The author concludes with an outlook for further research and the usefulness of destination governance research as a model for tackling small world problem issues and therefore the challenges of collective action.

Over the past 75 years, aspects of destination marketing and management (DMM) received considerable attention (Avila-Robinson and Wakabayashi, 2018), for instance in domains such as destination governance (d’Angella et al., 2010), leadership (Pechlaner et al., 2014) and business models of tourist organisations (DMOs) (Reinhold et al., 2018). Views of DMM have changed considerably over this period. After decades of structural work dominating DMM with the DMO as focal actor and competitive positioning as end (Buhalis, 2000), the 2010s have seen exciting, more multifaceted conceptualizations of destinations (Beritelli et al., 2014; Pearce, 2014) that will hopefully help deal with the sector’s changing practical issues and inspire future contributions. This paper provides a selective review of sectoral and academic developments that have led to the flow-based view of DMM (Beritelli et al., 2015) and inspires future work. Switzerland is an exemplary example of a mature tourism destination that serves as a living laboratory (Beritelli and Laesser, 2014), as pioneering context of tourism studies and as a cradle of DMOs (Pike and Page, 2014).