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This paper aims to provide a selective review of sectoral and academic developments that have led to the flow-based view of destination management and marketing and inspires future work.

A review of the relevant literature serves as a foundation for the discussion of the flow-based view of destination management and marketing. From the results of this review, future prospects for practice and research are derived.

Destination management and marketing has undergone many changes in the past and is subject for some major overhauls in the future.

The paper inspires in terms of rather asking questions for the future than finding answers from the past.

The need and legitimacy of destination management organizations (DMOs) are increasingly questioned. Still, the tourism literature provides little advice on how DMOs change and finance their activities for the benefit of their destination-given contextual change. This conceptual article aims to contribute to filling this gap. The authors do so by proposing a typology of business models for destination management organizations.

With the help of typological reasoning, the authors develop a new framework of DMO business model ideal types. To this end, the authors draw on extant literature on business model typologies and identify key dimensions of DMO business models from the tourism literature.

The challenges DMOs face, as discussed in the tourism literature, relate to both ends of their business model: On the one end, the value creation side, the perceived value of the activities they traditionally pursue has been declining; on the other end, the value capture side, revenue streams are less plentiful or attached to more extensive demands. On the basis of two dimensions, configurational complexity and perceived control, the authors identify four distinct ideal types of DMO business models: the destination factory, destination service center, value orchestrator and value enabler.

The authors outline a “traditional” DMO business model that stands in contrast to existing DMO classifications and that relates DMO challenges to the business model concept. The typology provides an integrated description of how DMO business models may be positioned to create and capture value for the organization and the destination(s) it serves. The ideal types point to important interdependencies of specific business model design choices.

Overnight taxes are controversial. They affect tourists’ consumption behavior and hotels’ profits. This potentially generates undesirable industry practices such as underreporting overnights to evade overnight taxes. The aim of the paper is to understand the conditions and outcomes of underreporting. This is important because underreporting affects destinations’ tax income, which in turn may have further effects on tourism or other public services.

This study uses qualitative comparative analysis to identify what specific combinations of conditions motivate managers of hospitality businesses to evade overnight taxes.

While potential economic gain seems to be the obvious answer, this study finds that different configurations of causal conditions account for non-compliance. Four different configurations combining six conditions explain the logics behind hotel overnight tax evasion behavior. The conditions refer to both utilitarian affordances and the individual tax morale of hospitality managers. Certain utilitarian conditions in combination can overrule moral objections to non-compliance.

The study provides a nuanced understanding of overnight tax evasion motives and suggests how to connect work on tourism taxes with destination governance issues and destination management organization funding.

This paper aims to identify means and ways to reduce redundancies and increase relevance in tourism research in a culturally diverse and globalised world.

The content of this paper is based on minutes of an extensive discussion (panel as well as townhall-type of discussion) at the 2015 AIEST conference in Lijiang, PR China.

Challenges in today’s tourism research world are identified and ways of how to deal with them are shown. Some of those solutions might provoke change in certain domains. This is why ideas are provided for the AIEST to support and facilitate this change.

Limitations come from the research settings of this contribution, which is essentially based on records of a panel and a townhall-type discussion.

We try to provide food for thought, in order to provoke one or the other discussion. This is why we are happy to receive feeback.

Hotel managers are being challenged by the increasing multitude of distribution and sales channels. Online travel agencies (OTAs) in particular generate a great deal of uncertainty: Which are the best ones? Which ones offer the best conditions? How many channels are optimal for my hotel? How can I evaluate costs versus benefits? These and other questions concerning the optimal online distribution channel strategy have produced different reactions in practice. The aim of this paper is to challenge the need for an over-optimization of channel strategy by proposing that the consumer, at the end, deals with a network of information presented on one networked environment, including the Web. Hence, the network effect of the numerous online platforms is what drives consumer choice and, finally, bookings.

A series of multiple regressions with representative samples of hotels in Switzerland from the years 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 was performed to estimate the importance of the number of platforms against other independent variables. Additionally, further multiple regressions with samples from the years 2011 and 2012 using the most important platforms (first-tier channels) shows again that the number of platforms is more important.

The analyses show that the estimated number of online bookings by the respondents in the hotels is a result of the number of channels, not the type of channel. This is particularly true for non-categorized establishments and one- and two-star hotels. The analyses do not confirm the billboard effect, according to which particular platforms (first-tier channels) increase the probability of bookings. Thus, the survival strategy is to maximize share of shelf and to build on interdependencies and network effects.

The study looks only at online bookings. Additional research into the connection between online and offline channels, particularly from the viewpoint of the consumer, will provide further insights. The study looks at the booking volume per channel, not the monetary sales volume or the profit. A study that quantifies not only the volume of bookings but also the total profit or the contribution to profit per channel could quantify the benefits of the multi-channel strategy.

The multiple online channel strategy seems to be the more effective approach to maximizing bookings online, regardless of the platforms chosen. Results of the study challenge the current opinion among practitioners that the multitude of distribution channels forces them to choose among single online channels and, therefore, drives the search for criteria to assess these channels or even to disregard them. The consistent results across 2009-2012 show that even in the turbulent phase of the advent of OTAs in the travel industry, hotels can adopt a winning strategy. Finally, the results suggest that the intermediation of online distribution of hotel beds has approached the condition of perfect competition, causing the OTA business model to be cannibalized.

Most state-of-the-art approaches for the analysis of the process of travel decision-making follow Woodworth’s neo-behaviouristic S–R (stimulus–response) or S–O–R (stimulus–organism–response) model. However, within this model, scholars primarily focus on the S–R relationship, investigating specific decisions by describing or explaining an outcome as the result of an input of several stimuli. There is a lack of investigation into the “O” dimension of the S–O–R model. This paper aims to contribute towards closing of this gap by conceptually and holistically expanding existing models with new perspectives and components.

The authors base the conceptual process on a subjective/interpretative research paradigm, by combining outcomes from different theories and concepts into a new, more holistic approach; and challenging this approach by seeking counterarguments as well as supportive arguments at three conferences and workshops.

The paper expands the body of literature by positing a generic conceptual operationalization model focusing on the organism (“O”) domain of decision-making. To achieve this, and further to operationalize the S–O–R model, the paper proposes to integrate an M–O–A (motivation–opportunity–ability) approach.

The analysis of the body literature reveals that there is still a lack of analytical and especially workable models/approaches for the analysis of the process of tourist decision-making. The paper contributes to that discussion by offering an alternative and generic operationalization of the tourist decision-making process by inducing a theoretical framework from the deductions gleaned from a number of existing theories.

This paper examines the financial aspect of hallmark sport events. It describes the financial requirements and the sources of income. Thereby an integrated concept of financing hallmark sport events has been developed which allows to compare those events independently to situational differentiation. On the basis of literature research the first part shows the mechanisms of action of the event management, the financial requirements and the sources of income. The second part points out the three dimensions of the classification model and the third part illustrates the implications of the model through the case study of the Engadin Ski Marathon 2001 and the FIS Alpine World Ski Championships in St. Moritz 2003. The paper concludes with the three major influences on an integrated model and some points for further research.

Developing places bears several challenging questions such as: “How can strategic initiatives be identified? How can we purposefully link businesses, attractions, and living spaces? How must we shape the environment of a place so that it allows for the emergence of a ‘good atmosphere’?” The case of Altdorf (CH) presents how a community first identified current activities by reconstructing flows of visitors. By doing so, they assessed the quality of services and the overall feeling about the town. Imminent new projects such as the enlargement of the main train station with the development of a new business centre as well as the new traffic concept in the town centre have triggered a new design of the place. This implied involving actors at different stages and combining spatial configuration and trajectories, infrastructure, services and heritage in a meaningful way. The case of Altdorf presents a practical and straightforward way of making the complexity and dynamics of a place well understandable to every person involved.

Workshop 2 was chaired by Pietro Beritelli who initially introduced the presenters of the three following contributions. They have been dealing with the adaptation of marketing tools, objectives and strategies due to new demand patterns of clients (paper 1), new technical facilities in marketing tools assessment (paper 2) and new marketing strategies in the ever growing special interest tourism of MICE. He stresses that despite these three diverse backgrounds they all represent relevant approaches to deal with volatile demand in evoking trends in tourism.