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Strategic visitor flows and destination management organization

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“From flows of power to the power of flows” (M. Castells).

Abstract

The relevance of the monitoring of visitor flows (VF), namely the general or aggregate patterns of travellers’ movements in a given area is twofold. On the one hand, they are relevant for the spatial description of travel networks. On the other hand, VF patterns are challenging traditional organization of destination management (DM) and are becoming a strategic tool. VFs are useful for reshaping the DM organization’s governance model from a static-central model to a dynamic network. The aim of this research is to estimate SVF using the data movement recorded by a test carried out with an anonymised and highly aggregated mobile phone data set, provided by Swisscom—the major Swiss mobile company. This research sheds some light on the relevance of VF in the understanding and improving of DM organization governance. Furthermore, it provides evidence of the existence of SVF at different levels of geographical scale obtained by network analysis techniques.

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Acknowledgements

The research was supported by the grant SX46769 “Travel behaviour” by the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland Valais. Many thanks to Pascal Favre research officer and Simone Dimitriou at the Institute of Tourism (HES-SO Valais-Wallis) and Swisscom. The authors wish to thank Mr Thomas Steiner CEO of the Union fribourgeoise du tourisme and the anonymous referees for their useful comments. A first version of this paper was presented at Enter 2017 in Rome and the authors thank the participants for their comments and feedback.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Master in Economics and Tourism, Bocconi University, Milan, Italy

    Rodolfo Baggio

  2. National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University, Tomsk, Russia

    Rodolfo Baggio

  3. Institute of Tourism, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland Valais, Sierre, Switzerland

    Miriam Scaglione

Authors
  1. Rodolfo Baggio
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  2. Miriam Scaglione
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rodolfo Baggio.

Additional information

This paper is an extended and updated version of a conference paper titled ‘Strategic Visitor Flows (SVF) analysis using mobile data’ previously published in the proceedings of Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2017 Conference (ENTER 2017) held in Rome, Italy, January 24–26, 2017.

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Baggio, R., Scaglione, M. Strategic visitor flows and destination management organization. Inf Technol Tourism 18, 29–42 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40558-017-0096-1

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