旅游目的地的吸引力和竞争力：关于意大利南部地区的研究【外文翻译】

外文翻译

原文

The attractiveness and competitiveness of tourist destinations: A study of Southern

Italian regions

Material Source: Tourism Management

Author:Maria Francesca Cracolici and Peter Nijkamp

Abstract：The present paper aims to assess the relative attractiveness of competing tourist destinations on the basis of individual visitors' perceptions regarding a holiday destination. Using the feeling of tourist well-being achieved by individual tourists we evaluate indirectly the competitive ability of the tourist area to offer a compound tourist site attractiveness. The methodology employed here uses individual survey questionnaires on the tourists' evaluation of the quality of tourist facilities and attributes in a given area (the ‘regional tourist profile’) a s the basis for constructing an aggregate expression for the relative attractiveness of that area. Using various multidimensional statistical techniques an estimation of the competitive attractiveness of the Southern regions in Italy is pursued. We also compare our findings with quantitative results on tourist competitiveness values obtained in a related previous study on tourist competitiveness in Italian regions. Finally, the paper highlights the need to use micro and macro data to analyse tourist attractiveness and to identify policies for improving regional tourist competitiveness. Keywords:Tourist attractiveness; Tourist competitiveness; Resource based view; Multi-attribute utility; Principal component analysis

1. Introduction

Discretionary time consumption has become an important activity for many people in a modern welfare society. As a consequence, the leisure sector has become a prominent economic industry in the Western world. The rise in disposable income and in free time in recent decades has created the foundation for a new lifestyle, where recreation and tourism have become major elements of consumer behaviour. Today, in many regions and countries, tourism is regarded as one of the major growth industries that deserve due policy attention. Clearly, tourism has become a global socio-economic phenomenon in a mobile world.

The new trend in modern tourism towards non-traditional and remote destinations is likely an expression of the passage from mass tourism to a new age of tourism, and illustrates a change in the attitudes and needs of many tourists towards tailor-made tourist facilities ([Fayos–Solà, 1996] and [Poon, 1993]). Nowadays, isolated or previously unknown destinations have become places to be explored, since they meet the tourists' expectations: namely, a unique or special leisure experience based on a specific tourist destination profile.

A tourist destination (e.g. city, region or site) is at present often no longer seen as a set of distinct natural, cultural, artistic or environmental resources, but as an overall appealing product available in a certain area: a complex and integrated portfolio of services offered by a destination that supplies a holiday experience which meets the needs of the tourist. A tourist destination thus produces a compound package of tourist services based on its indigenous supply potential. This may also create fierce competition between traditional destinations seeking to maintain and expand their market share and new destinations that are trying to acquire a significant and growing market share. The success of tourist destinations thus depends on their regional tourist competitiveness in terms of the attractiveness characteristics (or quality profile) that make up the tourist strength of a certain area (see also [Agrawal, 1997], [Butler, 1980] and [Hovinen, 2002]).

The dynamic nature of tourist channel competition requires destinations to be able to combine and manage their tourist resources in order to gain competitive advantage (see Teece, Pisano, & Shuen, 1997). The new needs of tourists impose destinations constantly to reconfigure, gain, and dispose of attractive resource able to meet the demand of a shifting market. This has led to the concept of dynamic capabilities; viz. organisation's processes (in our case tourist destination) that “integrate, reconfigure, gain and release resources to match and even create market change” (Eisenhardt & Martin, 2000: p. 1107).

In the tourist field competition among territorial areas is usually not centred on the single aspects of the tourist product (environmental resources, transportation, tourism services, hospitality, etc.), but on the tourist destination as an integrated and compound set of tourist facilities for the client ([Buhalis, 2000] and [Ritchie and Crouch, 2000]). As a consequence, destinations have to face the challenge of managing and organizing their scarce resources efficiently in order to supply a holiday experience that must outperform alternative destination experiences on the tourist market. Consequently, in the recent literature the analysis and measurement