ABSTRACT
The dynamics of the international tourism landscape demands ever more the adoption of innovative and structured approaches. The evolution of tourist consumption towards models of increasing personalisation, the increasing competitive pressure between destinations, and the globalisation of the tourist market are only some of the factors that have dictated the need to adopt an ‘integrated management’ of tourist locations. The introduction of the logic of destination management represents an attempt to embrace instruments to manage, in a coordinated way, the potential of a tourist attraction. The aim is, on one hand, that of valuing the complementarities between the natural resources and services in terms of their ability to be exploited. On the other hand, the goal is to stimulate the start of solid cooperative relationships among all stakeholders (public and private), with the additional objective of more profitable and efficient promotional and commercialisation activities on the international market (Dwyer & Kim, 2003; Framke, 2002). The empirical evidence shows the existence of various models of destinations or types of districts, which differ in terms of integration (or fragmentation) levels, and therefore of coordination between the public and private actors operating in a certain area (Lozano, Gòmez & Rey-Maquieira, 2005). Amongst the conditions that over the course of the last few years have allowed integrated destinations to emerge, and have given the right importance to the whole territorial network in an innovative and original way, information and communication technologies (ICTs), with their support to the operational and management processes, have assumed a decisive position. They have proved to be critical for the development of this ‘information intensive’ sector and have played an important role in binding up the local tourism operators favouring the integration of the destination product/service chain and spreading common competences and know-how (Buhalis, 2003; Pollock, 1995). A growing strand of literature considers a destination as a typical complex adaptive system (Baggio, 2008). Characteristics such as non-linear
relationships among the system components, self-organisation of the structures, resilience to external shocks are defining traits for a complex adaptive system (Holland, 1995), and can be easily identified in a tourism destination. A network graph representation, in which the nodes correspond to the organisations (public or private) belonging to the local tourism system, is especially suited for this type of system. The study presented in this work uses the science and tools of network thinking to examine the structural properties of the hyperlinks between the websites of tourism operators in two destinations: the Fiji Islands and Elba, Italy.
