Tourism Observatories 3.0: A Transnational Experiment in the Med
30 Pages Posted: 10 Sep 2018
Date Written: September 10, 2018
Abstract
Following the precedent set by the Virtual Tourism Observatory run by the European Commission-DG GROW a few years ago, several initiatives have taken place to design and manage tourism observatories at both the transnational and local level. However, these initiatives do not yet seem able to provide adequate operational responses to the challenges that the Commission launched with the original VTO. While the opportunities offered by the Web 3.0 still do not seem to have been sufficiently taken advantage of, such initiatives also have not yet developed suitable methodologies to operationally include the tourism industry in the studies and monitoring performed by the OTs. This work presents an OT prototype including a participatory DSS (PDSS) designed specifically to overcome the aforementioned limits. The prototype was tested in 2017 on the entire eligible area of the 2014-2020 MED Programme covering 52 regions. The potentialities of this PDSS are shown through two case studies, one Italian and the other Portuguese.
Keywords: Tourism Observatory, Destination Management, Decision Support System, participatory processes, coastal and maritime destinations
JEL Classification: L83, O18, R58
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation