TOURISM DESTINATION MANAGEMENT: UN APPROCCIO MULTIDISCIPLINARE

The Tourism Destination Management field addressed tourism sector mainly from economic, environmental and political point of view but, an important 'change of regime' is taking place. Recently, we assist to a growing interest in so-called "hopeful tourism", an emerging, value-based paradigm, an innovative perspective, which uses new approaches to tourism discipline. An increasing number of "responsible tourism” researchers are now interested in making tourism knowledge geared towards ethical and global objectives, interpreting tourism as a catalyst capable of playing a central role in creating more sustainable world challenge and in promoting human dignity, rights and social justice.Tourist destination is seen as the unit of analysis suitable for this purpose. The themes developed emphasize important ethical, social and cultural aspects related to destinations. Given the multidisciplinary characteristic of tourism discipline, we adopts a holistic and socio-cultural approach by developing arguments through different perspectives combining humanistic values and scientific methods. This study is composed by three papers whose titles are: 1) Value co-creation and territory. The Monumenti Aperti case study; 2) Managing destination accessibility using information technologies tools; 3) Branding tourism destination and cultural myths. The first article aims to explore the issue of value co-creation, normally applied in enterprise sector, in the management of cultural attractions in a specific territory/destination. Using a case study, Monumenti Aperti event, we evaluate key aspects and emergent issue and factors that may foster local players to embrace the logic of value co-creation in destination management and development. It proposes and tests a first model able to describe the complexity of territorial value co-creation and to underline the relationships between identity, commitment, and value co-creation dimensions. The second study point out as the acceptance of diversity and the pursuit of equity and inclusiveness are important parameters in evaluating good and sustainable local tourism governance. The goal is to provide a framework able to analyse the relations between sustainable tourism development, tourism accessibility for People with Disability (PwD) and Information Technology (IT), focusing on the role of I.T. to overcome accessibility issues. A combined methods was adopted (Authomatic method and User judgement) involving PwD in evaluating website accessibility. A sample based on tourism destinations websites who won Sustainable and Accessible European Awards, has been used. The criteria and tools are taken from the UNWTO recommendations and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 to evaluate perception, discoverability, understanding and use capabilities dimensions. Results allow to better understand the way in which sustainable destinations deal with the issue of accessibility and to realize what prior fields and web tools destinations should implement to achieve global accessibility. The third article extend the research on destination branding processes and the influential role of residents on building brand destination identity and personality. The study aims to explore the role of residents in the construction of destination identity. We use the Sardinian myth of Janas, promoted through a movie. Applying qualitative methods, using in-depth interviews with the producers of the movie, we identified attributes and dimensions used in the second part of the study, which consists in employing projective techniques (word association, sentences completion and personalisation) with residents who saw the movie. Results allowed to deeply understand the link between brand identity, personality and community identity in the branding process and the effectiveness of the strategy used.