Thomas Bieger

Tourism is a multidimensional phenomenon that not only represents an important global economic sector, but also influences geographical patterns, social communities, regional economic networks, and political relations. Due to the comprehensive nature and integrative character of the tourism sector, there have always been efforts to analyze this object of investigation based on systemic and cross-disciplinary approaches. One of the main properties of tourism services is the dependence on co-crteation, because tourism products consist of various service elements delivered by independent companies and even customers. This special issue features contributions that cover different prespectives on the coordination of the tourism service chain. It also contains articles dealing with important resources with public good character for tourism company networks and destinations such as data and quality of labor markets. Second homes open access to important resources for destinations. The different roles of customers as co-producers, customers, and even investors is a topic covered in the last contribution.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, second home ownership created several owner benefits. This paper analyses price changes of second homes during the pandemic. It derives propositions for the impact of the pandemic on the value of second homes for its owners. The contribution draws on panel data of transaction prices for second homes from Switzerland, a country with traditionally strong second home ownership, provided by Wüest Partner. The results show that there is a significant price increase for second homes – especially compared to apartments – after the start of the COVID-19 crisis. They also show that prices even in certain second-class destinations have risen significantly during the pandemic. Different research propositions are derived like that buyers might look for less crowded places in the pandemic, and the reduced benefits of intensive infrastructures during a pandemic.

The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct and analyze the long history of Tourism Review and try to outline the future of this journal.

Starting from the tenet that destination management deserves a systemic approach the authors first explain the meaning of systemic leadership and then discuss its relevance for tourist destinations. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it develops a concept of destination leadership based on a systemic perspective and therefore prevents a common misunderstanding, namely that destination leadership may simply generate from organizational leadership. Second, the concept builds on extant literature on destination governance and in so doing it stretches the vector of this research stream (governance) into a supplemental field (leadership). Based on recent empirical research in the field of systemic research in destinations, the concept of destination leadership is elaborated in a wider context of destination management. As a result, a set of dimensions and mechanisms which drive the systemic development of destinations can be distilled. A framework for further research is proposed and tested with the help of an empirical study with a set of influential actors from four destinations in Switzerland, Austria, and Italy. Originality/value - The results reveal that influence as a proxy for systemic leadership is supported by trust and effective communication. Other leadership dimensions derived from traditional leadership literature such as mutual understanding, accessibility (non-significant) or likeability (negatively affecting influence) prove to be irrelevant to systemic leadership. The implications underline the need to differentiate between leadership in inter-organizational arrangements and leadership in destinations, understood as communities and complex social systems.

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.