THE ROLE OF RELATED VARIETY AND COMMONS ON HERITAGE TOURIST DESTINATIONS

The purpose of this work is to investigate the factors underlying the competitiveness and clustering of tourist firms in tourist destinations. Several recent studies have attempted to analyse the growth of tourist destinations (Yang and Fik 2014; Lazzeretti and Capone 2009). However, to date, the reasons why firms cluster in tourist destinations and the factors involved in clustering have not been investigated. This work is innovative in that it extends theories that support clustering as a determinant of local competitiveness and improved business performance to the tourism industry. The study applies an analysis model to the factors that underlie the clustering of tourist firms in an Italian context from 2001 to 2011. In this context, there is a growing emphasis in tourism studies on the related variety approach (Sanz-Ibanez and Clave 2014). The work develop an integrated approach based on: classical studies on tourist destinations and tourism clusters, an evaluation of the relevance of activities with high cognitive proximity through the related variety approach (Frenken et al. 2007), in addition the role of common goods as environmental resources and heritage is taken into account. The results show that related variety is an important factor in the clustering of tourist firms, the existence of groups of related tourist activities is essential for the destination’s development and competitiveness. Another important factor relates to a destination’s commons goods as natural and environmental resources, as the effect of being a UNESCO world heritage site, that add to the attractiveness of tourist destinations.