Shaping and Re-Shaping Tourism Areas: A Network Approach

Defining the boundaries of tourism destinations has been long recognised as a problem in tourism research. The authors aim to define the spatial configuration of tourism areas including different destinations within a same region. Tourist mobility is employed as a methodological criterion to reveal the network relationships among destinations and explain how tourism areas are being shaped and reshaped. The study combines Network Analysis methods and multinomial logistic regression models, in an approach to processing the data of a sampling survey, carried out in Sicily. The results show that the network structures among destinations affect the shape and dimension of tourism areas. Useful evidence for the spatial planning of tourism regions and destination management strategies are derived.