Tourism destinations as digital business ecosystems

TL;DR

This paper explores how digital business ecosystems, enabled by ICTs, are transforming the structure and stakeholder relationships within tourism destinations, emphasizing the coupling of real and virtual components.

Contribution

It introduces a framework to assess the impact of digital ecosystems on tourism destinations, highlighting the co-evolution of real and virtual components as a unified system.

Findings

Digital ecosystems significantly influence tourism destination structures.

Real and virtual components are strongly coupled and co-evolve.

The integrated system enhances stakeholder networking.

Abstract

Tourism has been experiencing very relevant changes since when Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), in all their forms, have started to pervade the industry and the market. In the last decade, a new concept gained the attention of both researchers and practitioners, that of Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE). It can be considered as a technological infrastructure aimed at creating a digital environment to support and enhance networking between enterprises and stakeholders operating within a sector. Aim of this paper is to assess the extent to which the technological connection has affected the structural configuration of the tourism system and, specifically, of tourism destinations. The present study argues that two components can be considered when assessing the relationships among stakeholders within a tourism destination: a real and a virtual one. Further it shows how these two components are structurally strongly coupled and co-evolve forming a single system.