Editorial

Citation

Laesser, C. (2012), "Editorial", Tourism Review, Vol. 67 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/tr.2012.36967baa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Tourism Review, Volume 67, Issue 2

Dear readers

The 2nd issue of this volume of Tourism Review contains five papers.

The first paper by Kirstin Hallmann, Svenja Feiler, Christoph Breuer pursues the investigation of sport motivations of tourists during their holidays as well as the tourist’s participation in water sport activities, using the example of the German North Sea island Sylt. The results of this research indicate the diverse nature of water sport tourists and their underlying motivations. It is shown that holiday sport motivation depends on the actual sports practiced by the travellers, implying that prior sport motivation and involvement influence travellers’ sport motivation.

The second paper by Kirstin Hallmann and Ralf Roth tropicalizes stakeholder perception of competitiveness. Six stakeholder groups were detected. In essence, this study emphasizes the complexity of the tourism product. Moreover, it is shown that differences in the perception of the destination competitiveness dimensions occur based on the industry the respondent works in. Overall, the usefulness for measuring destination competitiveness by the Ritchie and Crouch (2003) model is confirmed.

In the third paper, Harald Pechlaner, Marcus Herntrei, Sabine Pichler and Michael Volgger bring forward a case to expand destination management towards governance of regional innovation systems. They show that the processes behind the development of an integrated regional management and marketing can be observed in several Alpine regions and major cities. A case study on South Tyrol shows the synergies of the different regional actors, as well as implications for the governance of such regional innovation systems.

In the fourth paper, Harald Pechlaner, Sabine Pichler, and Marcus Herntrei bring forward the notion, according to which destinations are forced to provide emotional experiences along the entire tourist service chain within the destination space. The challenge is to transform the space of the tourist’s movements into one of experiences. In this study, a conceptual framework for such a mobility and experience space in the destination is developed.

Finally, the last contribution in this issue discusses the role of commitment in the succession of hospitality businesses (authors: Mike Peters, Margit Raich, Stefan Märk, and Sabine Pichler). The results reveal that commitment seems to play a very major role in the whole succession. There appears to be a linkage of three topics: motives, family-business and take-over, which constitute the construct “commitment”. The motives show that parents’ heritage or the successors’ perceptions of the business as the home where they have grown up are important reasons to run this family business.

We wish you a good and hopefully interesting read.

Kind regards

Christian LaesserEditor-in-Chief