Do tourist clusters boost hotels’ performance? Resilience in a crisis period in Italy

Despite the relevance of the cluster concept in tourism studies, the contribution of the agglomeration of firms to the performance of firms is often taken for granted and most researches on tourist clusters are limited to specific case studies. The aim of this research is to test and measure the effects of clustering in the tourism industry in a crisis period, in particular whether the hotels have better performance if they are located inside clusters. In order to investigate this aspect, we first proceed to map tourist clusters in the Italian territory using 2011 ISTAT Census of Industry and Services throughout the methodology of location quotients. We then analyse the performances of more than 11,000 hotels located in the Italian territory in a span of five years as from Amadeus database (2008–12).