ABSTRACT
In relative terms, very few tourists visit a macro-region or country such as Spain, USA, etc. Tourists are interested in regions and towns, such as Andalucia in Spain, the Algarve in Portugal, New York in the USA, and the Flemish art cities. These are ‘tourism clusters’. Porter (1998) defines clusters as ‘geographic concentrations of interconnected companies and institutions in a particular field. Clusters encompasses an array of linked industries and other entities important to tourism’. He refers to the California wine cluster as a good example.This includes hundreds of commercial wineries, thousands of independent wine-grape growers, an extensive complement of industries supporting both wine-making and grapegrowing (suppliers of grape stock, irrigation and harvesting equipment, barrels, labels), advertising firms, local institutions involved with wine, and the enology program at the University of California at Davis.
