Classifying Tourism Destinations: An Application of Network Analysis

Tourism is basically a spatial phenomenon, which implies moving consumption within space. Starting from the assumption that the destinations are nodes of a network, we were able to reconstruct a spatial grid where each locality showed different grades and types of centrality. The analysis, paying particular attention to the spatial dimension, showed clusters of locations. Employing traditional network analysis measures, the paper attempts to classify destinations considering the routes of a selforganized tourists sample that visited more than one site in Sicily.