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In recent years, network science has become a dynamic and promising discipline. This study aims to provide a brief summary of the subject and the application to the tourism domain.

This paper is based on a non-exhaustive survey of the literature.

The state-of-the-art of network science in tourism is explored and discussed, together with possible future developments.

This paper uses a limited set of works, those deemed the most significant to sketch the situation. The choice might be subjective, but the overall picture is clear. Given what accomplished so far, the methods of network science seem interesting both for their theoretical and practical outcomes. In essence, they provide a better and more objective view on the structural and dynamic characteristics of the tourism phenomenon and of the different tourism systems and components.

This paper critically reflects on the state of network science and its application to the tourism domain. Even without claiming to be complete, this paper takes a general perspective approach rather than examining single topics or issues.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of how quantitative analysis methods have been and can be used to improve the competitiveness of tourism destination. The focus of the study is social network analysis (SNA).

The research methodology is qualitative and consists of the review literature relevant to this thesis. This methodology is necessary to give an account of the methods and the techniques adopted for the data collection used in other economic sectors.

SNA is needed to analyze the creation and configuration of communities of practice within destination and to identify possible barriers to effective interaction. Essentially, it is a complex adaptive socio-economic system. It shares many (if not all) of the characteristics usually associated with such entities, namely, non-linear relationships among the components, self-organization and emergence of organizational structures, robustness to external shocks.

The most important limit of this paper is that all the results presented here do not concern a single case study. Future research studies will provide a larger number of cases and examples to give the necessary validation to the findings presented here.

This paper provides a view into the network of relationships that may give tourism organization managers a strong leverage to improve the flow of information and to target opportunities where this flow may have the most impact on regulatory or business activities.

SNA can help to detect actual expertise and consequently project the potential losses deriving from an inefficient flow of knowledge. In addition, the authors will be able to define roles in the organizational networks and make an evaluation of informal organizational structures over the formal ones. Traditional organizational theories lack a concrete correspondence with mathematical studies and in this respect the authors sought to identify a correspondence.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of past perspectives and future trends in tourism and hospitality research.

The study grounds the discussion on the timeline evolution of quantitative research methods.

Although still under-recognized by scholars, mixed methods represent the future of research in tourism and hospitality.

The investigation is confined to quantitative methods.

No other surveys sketch a period of 150 years of quantitative analyses in tourism and hospitality.

This paper aims to examine the complexity science approach to the tourism domain.

This study is a personal perspective

The study is an analysis of past and future applications.

Historical considerations

There is a little appreciation for the role network science can play in sustainable tourism, and it is not quite clear to what extent generic models from the tourism network analysis literature are applicable. In the international management literature, then, few significant studies exist that deal with the effects of network structures on the sustainable performance of tourism family businesses. This research analyzes these issues and discusses the state of the art of this area.

Based on a scrutiny of the literature conducted on research papers published in the last twenty years, this analysis focuses on the relation between network analysis methods and sustainable performance within the tourism family business domain. The paper uses a limited set of keywords, restricting the selection to tourism and hospitality works on sustainability. A qualitative content analysis is performed.

The results suggest a critical reflection on how the methods of network science can be profitably and advantageously used for supporting a sustainable performance of family businesses in tourism.

The paper contains a critical consideration on the potential drivers and drawbacks of the relationship between sustainability and networking in tourism and highlights some managerial implications. The analysis closes with some suggestions and indications for future research work.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how aesthetic features can be the basis for a virtuous chain that leads to social and economic development.

The aesthetic characteristics of a destination are an important attractive feature. More than that, they can be considered a key determinant for economic and social growth. A conceptual support to this idea is presented here by following a line which links beauty to creativity, innovation and socio-economic development.

A purely qualitative and logical-deductive line shows how beauty, creativity and innovation are connected in a chain that leads to socio-economic well-being.

This paper is conceptual in nature. The authors intend to use these considerations as a basis for future research.

This paper contributes to the literature on destination governance highlighting a number of factors that are often underestimated.

Taking stock of extant hospitality and tourism research using social network analysis approaches, this study highlights why using either quantitative or qualitative approaches to examine social networks can be misleading and generate potentially biased findings. Indeed, purely qualitative and purely quantitative studies display limitations. The purpose of this study is to provide methodological insights by suggesting that mixed methods can be suitably used, depending on the specific research questions.

The study consists of an analysis and critical discussion of the methods used in a number of papers leveraging social network approaches to study social networks in tourism and hospitality. The authors describe the benefits and limitations of each method studies considered are examined based on a number of aspects.

More than half of the studies classified as network studies adopt quantitative designs and quantitative methods including statistical analyses and observational data. Mixed methods study is a minority and they are almost never labeled as mixed methods. A relevant portion of qualitative studies increasingly embeds a number of rudimentary statistical analyses. With an example, the authors also discuss that purely quantitative or purely qualitative methods can lead to discrepant results, and thus, the authors encourage scholars to embrace mixed method research designs such as explanatory or exploratory sequential designs. Advanced researchers might attempt in the future to embrace transformative, embedded or multiphase mixed methods.

This study is based on academic papers and research published before 2019. A rich research agenda is designed.

This study contributes to explore the way social networks have been dealt with in tourism and hospitality research so far, by advancing a proposal to adopt mixed methods in the form of explanatory or exploratory sequential designs. To the best of the knowledge, it is the first study addressing methodological pitfalls in extant network-based research within the tourism and hospitality domain.

This paper aims to provide a network study of the structural and dynamical characteristics of tourism flows in Europe from 1995 to 2012.

Travels in Europe were studied by following the network science research paradigm and by focusing on the whole network of intra-European tourism destinations. Network analysis was used to map and reveal the pattern of connections between states as shaped by bilateral tourism flows. Data were provided by the United Nations World Tourism Organization, and the data were integrated with tourism data available from national statistical offices of the individual countries, when necessary.

For 2012, results obtained from the UNWTO record-based network were compared to geo-located Twitter data as a proxy of human mobility patterns. The present analysis provides evidence of a shift towards an increased homogeneity in the travelling preferences of European tourists, an acquired attitude of visitors to travel shorter distances and a tendency of mobility patterns to merge. Finally, the comparison between UNWTO and Twitter data shows a different spatial distribution of visitors. These results provide a useful insight for policymakers involved in tourism planning.

The contribution of this study is threefold. First, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the only study that focuses on the bilateral tourism flows between all countries falling, geographically or politically, under the definition of Europe. Second, evidence is provided of a shift towards a greater homogeneity in the travelling preferences of European tourists. Lastly, for the first time, this study provides a comparison between topological structure and bilateral mobility patterns of tourism flows, based on two different data-recording methods.

This paper aims to examine the question of whether commercial, peer-to-peer accommodation platforms (Airbnb, in particular) and hotels are in fierce competition with each other with the possible presence of substitution threats, and compares the time series of the occupancy values across two supplier types.

The cities of Milan and Rome are used as case studies for this analysis. To assess the extent of synchronization, the series of Airbnb and hotels are transformed into a series of symbols that render their rhythmic behavior, and a mutual information metric is used to measure the effect.

The results show that Airbnb hosts and hotels have different seasonal patterns. The diverse occupancy trends support the absence of direct competition between Airbnb and hotels. The findings are consistent in the two analyzed cities (Milan and Rome). Interestingly, there are higher similarities between seasonal occupancy series of Airbnb listings in Milan and Rome, on one side, and hotels in Milan and Rome, on the other, than between Airbnb and hotels in the same city.

The findings show a progressive de-synchronization (within mutual information) among the five groups of Airbnb hosts triggered by the rising professionalization degree. This result suggests the existence of a partial different business model for multi-listing hosts.

The study illustrates an absence of any substitution threat between Airbnb and hotels in both cities. This could have important consequences, especially for the pricing and revenue management policy. In fact, the higher the substitution threat, the higher the attention that Airbnb entrepreneurs should pay to the pricing strategy implemented by hotels, and vice versa.

This study sheds new light on the competition threat between Airbnb and hotels. In this study, hotels and Airbnb hosts appear as two very separate markets.

The aim of this paper is to provide a critical analysis of the main literature contributions that concern smart tourism development and management, highlighting gaps and logical inconsistencies. In addition, to further stress the importance of the issues at stake, a simulation is performed for showing how technology allows achieving better outcomes when a certain level of efficiency is obtained via re-engineering of main organizational and operational processes.

A content analysis of recent relevant literature is performed with the help of machine learning topic modelling algorithms. A network analytic approach to digital ecosystems, then, is used to study the relationship between technological tools and physical entities in a destination and how these and their combination affect the efficiency of the system at local and global levels.

The literature analyzed lacks a good discussion on the necessity to improve and rationalize the operational and organizational processes while emphasizing mostly the technological aspects. On the other hand, the simulation case presented shows that if information and knowledge flows are reasonably efficient and well organized in the physical world, the integration of digital components further enhances these processes, whereas inefficiencies can hinder the flow of information and reduce its efficiency.

Apart from the methods used, relatively little explored, the authors show that, as also much of the computer science literature states, a fundamental prerequisite for successful “smart” projects is a logical and effective restructuring of the main operational and organizational processes.

本论文旨在分析关于智慧旅游发展和管理话题的主要文献, 指出文献缺口和逻辑矛盾。此外, 为了进一步指出这个话题的重要性, 本论文运行了一个模拟程序, 以证明科技如何帮助冲破瓶颈达到新的高峰, 通过重组重要组织和流程管理。

本论文采用内容分析法, 并借助机器学习建模程序。本论文采用电子生态环境的网络分析方法来研究科技工具与实体设备在旅游目的地中的关联, 以及如何这些设备资源能够融合在区域和全球范围内提高系统效率。

文献分析结果表明, 大部分文章都着重强调科技方面, 而忽略了运营和组织流程的改进。此外, 本论文展示的模拟案件表明如果信息和知识流在实体世界中有效的利用和管理, 那么与电子软配件的结合就会更加相得益彰, 相反, 如果未达到有效结合, 那么将阻碍信息流和降低效率。

除去本文利用的研究方法相对很少学者涉及, 正如计算机科学文献所说, 本论文证实了成功的“智能”项目所需要的前提条件是主要运营和管理流程的逻辑有效的重组。