Salvador Anton Clavé

The evolution of destinations: towards an evolutionary and relational economic geography approach

Analytical approaches from emergent paradigms in economic geography – namely, evolutionary economic geography (EEG) and relational economic geography (REG) – can help to advance and integrate extant research in tourism geography on destinations’ dynamics and organisation. Taking into account concepts such as human agency, contextuality and path dependence, the paper conceptualises local tourism destinations’ evolution as a complex, path- and place-dependent process that is determined by the action and interaction of stakeholders and their ability to adapt or create new paths, as well as to survive in response to local and global changes. Hence, it discusses the bidirectional effects between stakeholder practices and local tourism destinations’ evolutionary performance. Furthermore, it attempts to increase the understanding of how and why destinations change over time, which is valuable for policy formation and to improve local tourism destinations’ competitiveness and sustainability. All in all, the paper presents theoretical insights from EEG and REG to facilitate understanding of the mechanisms underpinning the evolution of destinations and examines the advantages of building an integrated evolutionary and relational approach. This also means an opportunity to integrate the geographical analysis of tourism destinations into mainstream thinking on economic geography.

The evolution of coastal tourism destinations: a path plasticity perspective on tourism urbanisation

ABSTRACT Evolutionary and relational approaches to economic development are gaining ground in geography as a discipline, although in the subfield of tourism geography, their potential is only just becoming recognised. This article focuses on the evolution of mature tourism destinations, taking the path dependency concept forward from the notion of path creation into the new domain of path plasticity. Drawing on the notion of cultural political economy, we examine how tourism destinations can break with path dependency routines incrementally and move steadily towards different future paths, which may recast tourism in a different light in the overall “urban” context of the destination. Using a case study of a Mediterranean coastal destination on Catalonias Costa Daurada, we explore the inter-tangled tourism and urban development processes in relation to the socio-spatial dimensions of urban change. The article argues for a wider range of social and cultural criteria in the analysis of tourism evolution – advocating the use of path plasticity and a cultural political economy approach – to offer an alternative perspective on shifting tourism situations, reflecting the inherently “urbanising” nature of tourism development in the traditional coastal resort context. It adds to the growing literature on governance and strategy-making in sustainable tourism.

Mass Tourism Development on the Mediterranean Coast

Report on a joint meeting of the Research Group for Sustainability and Territory of the University of the Balearic Islands, the Research Group on Territorial Analysis and Tourism Studies of Rovira ...

Destination Image Gaps Between Official Tourism Websites and User-Generated Content

The aim of this paper is to analyse and compare destination image on official tourism websites with the image expressed by tourists in travel blogs and reviews in order to assess image congruency and identify image gaps at different geographical brand levels. This is done through a massive computerized semi-automatic content analysis of attraction factors and geographical elements on official tourism websites and in 46,576 travel blogs and review entries about Catalonia and its sub-regional brands. Our results show relative image congruency at regional level, but significant image gaps at sub-regional levels, indicating the need for coordinated image policies at different geographical levels.

A Method for Analysing Large-Scale UGC Data for Tourism: Application to the Case of Catalonia

In recent years, many articles have been published about the study of user-generated content (UGC) data in the domains of tourism and hospitality, in particular concerning quantitative and qualitative content analysis of travel blogs and online travel reviews (OTR). In general, researchers have worked on more or less population-representative samples of travel diaries, of tens or hundreds of files, which enables their manual processing. However, due to their dramatic growth, especially in the case of hospitality OTRs, this article proposes a method for semi-automatic downloading, arranging, cleaning, debugging, and analysing large-scale travel blog and OTR data. The main goal is to classify the collected webpages by dates and destinations and to be able to perform offline content analysis of the written text as provided by the author. This methodology is applied to analyse about 85,000 diaries of tourists who visited Catalonia between 2004 and 2013, and significant results are obtained in terms of content analysis.

Geographies of Tourism

Aims to map out the past and present of the tourism geographies sub-discipline within - and more importantly - beyond the English language contributions, and learn from the historical trajectories as well as experiences of tourism geographers working in different cultural and linguistic contexts.

Urban Tourism and Walkability

Even though little research has been undertaken on urban tourism and walkability, it represents a major theme with respect to the visitor use of city, especially in successful urban destinations around the world that are currently confronting deep challenges due to their very attractiveness. This chapter examines the paradoxes associated with urban tourism and walkability, argues that walkability and walkable urban places appear as a fertile arena for the sustainable future of urban tourism and highlights the need to adopt an approach that interconnects urban tourism with the wider domain of urban planning, management and governance.