La Network Analysis per lo studio della mobilità turistica

Understanding the spatial movement of tourists within a destination has practical applications for destination management, tourist products development and marketing strategies. The map-ping and modelling of tourist intra-destination movements are crucial for exploring a territorial network system and understanding its interconnected relationships.This paper proposes to apply methods borrowed from Network Analysis to map the spatial distribution of tourism mobility in Sicily. By means of traditional measures of Network Analysis, we propose to investigate the links among Sicilian destinations. The study aims to connect destinations, represented as nodes, to define a territorial network of tourism demand. In the specific instance, the degree centrality, closeness centrality, betweenness centrality are used to localize central areas and the main routes. We test survey data collected on a sample of tourists leaving from airports and ports of the main Sicilian cities, who visited two destinations at least. The study allows to highlight the network features of tourism in a multi-destinations net.