Special Issue: Business Models in Tourism

In mature and developing tourism markets, businesses, institutional actors, and policy makers are looking for ways to enable and establish a viable existence based on multifaceted tourist behavior. However, in the past decade, many actors along the tourism service chain have seen their traditional ways of doing business challenged by a combination of factors: Unexpected competition across traditional industry boundaries; change in context initiated or intensified by technological progress, change in tourist behavior, regulation, and economic conditions; and market realities and dynamics outdating beliefs, practices, and structural solutions on how to serve tourist needs in economically sustainable ways. Therefore, the tourism sector is looking to update and change how its actors create, capture, and disseminate value.

The business model is a central concept that helps practitioners and researchers to understand existing ways of doing business and how to change these ways for the benefit of the tourism sector. At its core, a business model provides a comprehensive description how a network, community, organization, or actor creates value and sustainably captures values from its activities (Casadesus-Masanell & Heilbron, 2015; Zott, Amit, & Massa, 2011). As such, it refers to both cognitive representations, which detail how actors understand their business, as well as tangible, material aspects that detail how an actor configures its business model (Baden- Fuller & Mangematin, 2013). From a practical perspective, the concept has intuitive appeal for strategic and entrepreneurial reasoning as it comprehensively describes how value is being created and captured following a procedural input-output logic. In addition, the business model offers ample research opportunities for tourism management to address the outlined challenges.


SCOPE
The subsequent questions summarize a few relevant challenges that indicate the potential scope of contributions to this special issue. We consider them a starting point and invite conceptual and empirical submissions from scholars at any career stage that help us understand and tackle characteristics of successful (new) business models, their management, and their innovation in tourism (incl. accommodation/hospitality, catering, transportation, entertainment/events, attractions, leisure, information, and services).

1. What can we learn from taxonomies and typologies of tourism business models? Each segment of the tourism sector is characterized by dominant and emerging business model configurations. The business model literature has started to look into techniques to adapt business models using analogical reasoning and conceptual transfer (Martins, Rindova, & Greenbaum, 2015) that will potentially benefit from taxonomies and typologies. Understanding what classes of configurations exist or can be theoretically distinguished in meaningful ways (Baden-Fuller & Morgan, 2010) is an essential step toward finding new answers to the changes in the tourism context.
2. How do tourism-specific contingencies influence business models? Business model research typically investigates business units of established industrial corporations or technology- and service-based startups. Tourism research, however, lacks a deeper understanding of tourism-specific contingencies such as distributed co-production and leadership in tourist destinations, public-private governance of organizations, industry routines and assessments, or dependence on public resources and policy interventions. There is potential to investigate how these contingencies affect development, management and change of tourism business models.
3. How do tourism business models support value creation among actors of diverse interests? Business models can be "vessels" to commercialize new tourism services that combine commercial and shared public value for social ends and that bridge different logics of actors from different domains. There is a need for research on processes by which tourism actors build business models that bridge the demands of actors with different interests and goals (e.g. for social ventures, Velamuri, Priya, & Vasantha, 2015; Yunus, Moingeon, & Lehmann-Ortega, 2010)
4. How can tourism business models support resilience? Some tourism actors have been operating their business models for decades in nearly unchanged form and are presently struggling to adapt to changing market conditions. Others find themselves experimenting with hybrid configurations (e.g., Franke, 2004; Wensveen & Leick, 2009). We encourage contributions to investigate how different types of tourism businesses can develop routines and practices that enable flexibility in business model cognition and enactment (Chesbrough, 2010). More broadly, there is a need to understand how future shocks can be absorbed and tourism businesses and systems are prepared for crises (Röhn, Caldera Sánchez, Hermansen & Rasmussen, 2015).

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