Tourism destinations, intended as the geographical areas where tourism happens, have been historically defined based on their administrative areas. This means that usually, a destination corresponds to a municipality, a province, a regional area, or an entire country. In other words, areas are often defined by their administrative boundaries.
This is a non-natural way of defining tourism destinations since the boundaries of a tourist destination do not necessarily correspond with conventional administrative or political boundaries. This definition negatively affects not only the definition of more realistic tourism destinations but also the functional planning and management of the tourism fluxes and their effects.
While geographical space is still an important element of new regionalism, territorial identity must be understood in a broader sense. According to different authors, territories as places, are more than mere lines on a map. They are constituted by function, by culture and shared identity, by political mobilization and leadership, and by institutions. The resulting functional, cultural, political and institutional meanings of territory do not always coincide.
Recent studies have therefore suggested that destinations should be delimited based on tourists’ consumption patterns and tourist mobilities, rather than on conventional administrative boundaries.
This is particularly relevant in places where local destinations lie on the borders, no matter if the borders are international or internal, where there is easy mobility to and from neighbouring cross-border destinations, and there is added value in the cross-border experience for visitors.
In this light, paying attention to the tourists’ actual mobilities might be a tool to better understand how the destinations might be reshaped, how tourism impacts certain areas, and how certain subareas of the destinations are over or under-pressed.
Knowing these mobilities might end up in analysing tourists’ tracks, hot spots, and overcrowded areas, and detecting the need for a more sustainable distribution of tourism. This will have implications for better planning of tourism areas, and better management of tourism destinations, among others.
Based on the above considerations, this session intends to welcome papers and discussion, with the aim to: 1) bring together all the innovative research in analysing the mobility of tourists, including the use of different technologies and existing information sources; 2) highlight new methods to deal with mobility and geographical data; 3) debate innovative methods to use the mobility information for better planning and management of tourism destinations. Additional information regarding the session type: This session will host presentations and it will be conducted in English.Additional information regarding the proposed topic:
This topic has been receiving attention in the academic world since the beginning of the century, but it was in the last decade that it exploded to improve how tourism is understood as a sustainable activity. The number of papers published in top academic journals has clearly increased in the last three years. That is also a side effect of the tourism change of habits generated by the covid-19 pandemic, increasing tourism activities in less developed and less massified areas, which usually means more rural spaces. This fact generated a higher need to better understand how to define tourism spaces to protect new tourism areas from the standard impacts of the activity.
Elisa Piva (1); Lluís Prats (2)
(1) Researcher (RTDa) in Economical and Political Geography at the Department of Business and Economic Studies, University of Piemonte Orientale, Italy, (2) Associate professor at the Faculty of Tourism and Chair of the Tourism Research Institute (INSETUR), University of Girona, Spain
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