Managing Tourist Destinations: Different Approaches to Destination Management in Italy

After a short review of international literature about destination management, this paper analyzes two different approaches to organize and manage tourist offering used by two Italian regions: Marche and Emilia Romagna. The main objective is to derive - via inductive logic - the conceptual meaning of these approaches compared to the literature on Destination Management and highlight its key managerial implications. The study shows that organizational solutions adopted by the Emilia Romagna region are innovative and original, because they were based on the consideration of a network of operators grouped by service category provided or tourist resources owned rather than focusing on territorial resources as a whole. The case of Marche region, moreover, shows how it is possible to design a hybrid organizational model capable of enhancing both specific themes of supply through the creation of proper networks of tourist operators, according to Emilia Romagna model, and the sub-regional areas grouped in S.T.L. (Local Tourist System). Despite the limitations due to the small number of the cases analyzed, the paper highlights some significant results which open up further research paths, aimed to improve tools and approaches to Destination Management.