Tourism Mobility Among Destinations: an Application of Network Analysis

The mapping and modelling of tourist movements are crucial for understanding interconnectionsamong destinations and building a territorial network system. 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 investigate the connections among destinations represented as nodes. The degree centrality,closeness centrality and betweenness centrality are used to localize central areas and the main tourist routes. We used survey data collected on a sample of tourists who visited two Sicilian destinations at least. The study allows to highlight the network features of tourism in a multidestinations net.Understanding the spatial movement of tourists among destinations has practical applications for destination management, tourist products development and marketing strategies.