ABSTRACT
Changes in the highly competitive international tourism industry take place at a dizzying pace – products and services are continually evolving and markets are rapidly globalised – forcing businesses continually to seek more cost-efficient production that does not sacrifice the quality of the visitor experience in order to gain a competitive edge. To achieve this, many tourism enterprises have begun collaborating with each other (Cline, 2000), creating solid business structures that optimise the investment of their assets. For example, in recent work published on this topic Chathoth and Olsen (2003) identified numerous strategic alliances in the hospitality industry, Sigala (2004a) analysed the development and the competitive advantages of collaborative practices among airlines and Morrison, Lynch and Johns (2004) identified and discussed collaborative processes and their benefits in a series of tourism networks. The importance of networks and their role in the development of sustainable management strategies for tourism destinations has also recently been studied (see Pechlaner, Abfalter & Raich 2002). Due to the increasing interdependence between all tourism businesses, it has become clear that the behaviour and operation of enterprises in this industry should be examined from the perspective of networks. These networks give their members access to information, resources, markets and technology. In addition to being an extremely important business resource, partnerships also offer sustained competitive advantages. Therefore, it is imperative for businesses operating in a tourism destination like the Canary Islands, where access to resources has traditionally been difficult (e.g. information on tourist behaviour, control over transportation), to create a network as a way to overcome the competitive disadvantages associated with its remoteness from the tourists’ home countries (Oreja-Rodríguez, Parra-López & Yanes, 2007). With this in mind, the objectives of this chapter are to review the importance and role of networks in increasing the overall competitiveness of tourism businesses and destinations and to ascertain the factors that
determine the success of collaborative practices. One of the first steps in meeting this objective was to analyse the literature in tourism in order to gain a clearer vision of what factors influence the success of tourism businesses in the Canary Islands. After completing this preliminary analysis, a previously developed framework was then applied to the context of the tourism industry in the Canaries in order to evaluate the readiness of tourism businesses in this region to develop collaborative networks.
