This study evaluates bibliometric analysis of sustainable tourism in the open innovation realm, depicts emerging themes, and offers critical discussion for theory development and further research. Through the use of bibliometrix, this paper investigates the amount of studies conducted in this area and verifies if such studies have represented a contribution to the evolving research in the field of sustainable tourism. Specifically, the paper identifies whether and to what extent scholars have explored these interconnections and maps to get to a conceptual structure of the field under investigation. The results identify the development status and the leading trends in terms of impact, main journals, papers, topics, authors, and countries. The analysis and the graphical presentations are crucial, as they can help both researchers and practitioners to better understand the state of the art of sustainable tourism in the experiential and digital era.
This paper investigates the main elements that can influence customer satisfaction in tourist services, with specific reference to tourism industry. The importance of this topic resides in the fact that tourists’ positive experiences of service, products, and other resources provided by tourism destinations can produce customer retention as well as positive word-of-mouth. Indeed, satisfaction with travel experiences contributes to destination loyalty. The degree of tourists’ loyalty to a destination is reflected in their intentions to revisit the destination and in their recommendations to others. Thus, information about tourists’ loyalty is important to destination marketers and managers in order to sustain destination attractiveness. Although predominant literature has adopted a demand-side perspective, this paper analyses tourist satisfaction according to an overlapping perspective that contemplates both the demand and the offer side where this latter, in the wider meaning, also includes the systemic perspective. More precisely, this paper aims to identify the principle competitive strategies that the variety of stakeholders, cooperating together in a destination, has to implement in order to increase tourist satisfaction and loyalty. Indeed, the point of view of this paper is to understand how destination attributes and services affect the tourist satisfaction. In order to study the link between destination attributes and tourist satisfaction, the paper collects cross-sectional data via questionnaire, from May 2012 to May 2013. The adopted approach allows to individuate the factors that can influence tourist satisfaction, their (positive or negative) direction and their magnitude. This paper uses 14 tourist satisfaction indicators in order to measure the global satisfaction. Furthermore, this study allows to identify the current strengths and weaknesses of the tourist offer. In particular, the study paid attention to the phase of service delivery since it is the time when customer satisfaction is generated. From this study, it comes out that tourist satisfaction depends on a complex process where the role of each actor is fundamental and it must be in tune with all the other ones. Findings show that tourists visiting Naples are not completely satisfied, supporting that Naples has not a clear destination image.
Over the years, literature on the topic of destination resilience has gained increasing attention in different fields (strategic management; sociology; etc.). Therefore, the potentiality of resilience in the tourism field has stimulated the definition and the implementation of strategies, policies, and activities addressed to mitigate risks and seize opportunities through open innovation attitudes in times of crisis. This work aims to contribute to the debate on tourist destination resilience by proposing a conceptual framework of destination resilience and open innovation based on a bibliometric analysis. Moreover, this article is intended as a starting point for a wider discussion of factors that contribute to destination resilience and therefore provides the basis to develop a toolkit of matrixes and approaches. Findings reveal that resilience assessment, as well as in terms of performance, remain undiscovered. Moreover, the present research poses some unresolved questions, shaping interesting future research directions.
1 October 2017 in European Journal of Tourism Research
In the latest years, the smart city theme has been widely discussed in both city planning and academic studies from various perspectives, i.e. technology, sustainability, management and tourism. This is mainly due to the urgency of rethinking the city because of the rapid population growth and the urbanization increase. These challenges are triggering many cities to find smarter management ways. Nonetheless, only a limited number of studies investigated systematically the smart cities phenomenon and its impact on tourism. In this research, we try to understand the smart city concept considering the strategic role of technologies as opportunities in the smart tourist destination, trying to fill the literature research gaps by identifying how cities have to manage urban planning to be labelled as “smart”, what can be the applications of smart strategies to tourism, what resources/capabilities smart cities need to possess to catch opportunities and face challenges coming from the tourism market, how the smart city planning and its tourist applications can enhance destinations competitiveness. The empirical analysis tests four successful smart cities: Milan, Singapore, London and Johannesburg. The final part includes some reflections on the integration of tourism development with city planning and its effects on urban smartness.