DESTINATION MANAGEMENT

The course of "Destination Management" is an elective course of the curriculum of "Intercultural Development of Tourism Systems". The main goal of the course is to provide an advanced understanding of destination management and governance, and in particular of those aspects related to managing interaction dynamics between different local stakeholders.
The course analyzes how specific resources and competences may help tourism managers and destinations’ administrators to get a sustainable competitive advantage. The course provides students with analytical tools to understand and identify the mechanisms that explain the origins of such competitive advantage, and those processes of mediation, management, and governance necessary to get it. The course will explore deeply the role of planning and policy, of strategies and leverages connected to them, in order to explain some success and failure models. Particular attention will be devoted to local specificities, and to the necessary declinations of extant theoretical models to discuss specific empirical cases.

1. Knowledge and understanding. Students are expected to acquire knowledge of the fundamental concepts of destination management and to understand how the underlying mechanisms of strategic choices related to tourism policies development.
2. Applying knowledge and understanding. Students will develop their capability to apply concepts and theoretical models proposed during the course to specific examples, often based on in-depth case studies, and to reason critically on the assumptions underlying such concepts and the limits of their applicability.
3. Judgmental capabilities. Students will learn to compare critically alternative explanations of phenomena related to destination management, and to develop their own analysis and suggest solutions in case studies.
4. Communication abilities. Students will learn to communicate with groups through in-class groupwork opportunities and to discuss their ideas with a broader audience in the classroom.
5. Learning abilities. The course will enhance the ability of students to make a critical use of the textbook and on theoretical models it presents, to look into integrative readings and empirical examples, and to integrate different forms of learning, in particular integrating text-based learning with case studies discussion.

Students are expected to have achieved the learning objectives of "Tourism marketing". In particular, students should be familiar with concepts and methods related to tourism firms' management and organization.

1. Destination management and destination governance
2. Destination planning and policy
3. Destination marketing and branding
4. Stakeholders management
5. Destination's competitiveness
6. Network theories

Destination Marketing and Management: Theories and Applications
Y. Wang and A. Pizam
CABI 2011

Chapters: 1, 2, 7, 8, 15, 16, 17, 20

The exam will be written, with three open questions, to be completed in 40 mins. Questions will ascertain the knowledge of concepts and models presented in the course, the capability to apply it to examples, and the critical understanding of such concepts. Each open question scores maximum 10 marks. Attending students will get +3 marks on the final grade if participating in all learning activities during the course (groupwork).

The course will be based on classroom teaching, with all material used during classes made available to attending students through the moodle platform.
During classroom hours there will be activities of case studies discussion, used to apply theoretical concepts presented during the week's classes to empirical cases.
Additional readings and materials will be available to attending students on the course moodle page.

Italian

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