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Studies on the impact of tourism in art cities underlined that many cities begun to suffer too many costs because of mass tourism. The problem of costs/benefits balance was in some case further complicated by the quick increase in a peculiar kind of excursionists — the so called false excursionists. Their increase is in fact joined with the spreading around the city of “alternative” accommodations. But false excursionists bring to the destination more costs and less benefits than traditional tourism, as a relevant part of their budget is spent where they are lodging. Thus, this sort of tourism “development” calls for visitors management policies able to reduce costs and maximize the tourism benefits for the city. But these policies require a deep understanding of the relationship between demand and accommodation supply, and between accommodations within and outside the city. And, more important, a continuous monitoring on how these relationships change in time, and why. Pricing and product strategies put into effect by accommodations, joined with changes in the demand behaviour, are in fact the basic variables of a mechanisms that might eventually lead to a substantial increase in false excursionists number and a stagnation in overnight tourists demand, with major consequences on the cost/benefits ratio for the art city as a whole. Aim of this paper is to introduce a set of 10 indicators and, through their application on the Venice situation, show how they can be used to analyze on diachronic terms the impact of accommodation evolution on demand choice.

Market globalisation produces a very competitive scenario that affects mainly enterprises operating in very fragmented contexts. Tourist enterprises have difficulty in finding economic and efficient conditions, they are generally small‐sized and the management culture in tourism is still at the beginning. Cooperation and integration among stakeholders operating in the tourism system are the conditions that ensure the full satisfaction of tourists' expectations; but also that promote the search for business economies. A tourist destination becomes a product only if it provides tourists with an integrated supply system. The cooperation among enterprises and institutions creates added value for the tourism destinations and for the single businesses, but operators have difficulty in recognising it. Especially the mature destinations are those that find it hard to change their mode of operating, mainly because they do not wish to re‐nounce to the perpetual annuities that have already been obtained. Some examples, with reference to the Italian situation, confirm this. Operators tend to evaluate the benefits of their initiatives in the short‐run, but the results of integration actions should be assessed in the medium‐ and long‐term. Furthermore, in a process of organisational change the powers and the skills tend to be redistributed unevenly. The points of view of tourists and enterprises shall overlap more and more till they can no longer be separated. In this way the services supplied will meet the tourists' expectations. The re‐organisation of the industrial sector proved that network‐based operations are essential for the efficiency of the enterprises and for the competitiveness of the tourist areas.

The TRIP (TouRism International Panel) Forecasting Models (1), the first regarding international tourist departures from each country of origin, the second international tourist flows to Italy and the third international departures from Italy, represent, through an appropriate mathematical and econometric analysis, the fixed effect approach of the panel data analysis, the economic process behind the foreign tourist's decision to holiday in Italy and the Italian tourist's decision to holiday abroad.

Tourism and transport represent two sides of the same management process, especially in tourism destinations characterised by a consistent or a rising volume of visitor flows.

Southern Italy (2) is a multiform and atypical system in the Italian tourist economy. According to a general image, one of its main features is the extensiveness and quality of the region's natural resources, especially the coastal areas, attractions which traditionally make the macroregion known essentially as a destination for “sun&sea” holidays. In recent years, moreover, due to growing and widespread awareness for environmental quality and for cultural factors, this image seems to have acquired new impulse and new occasions of interest. The wealth of particularly important historical, artistic and archaeological attractions (Magna Graecia, Roman and Arab‐Byzantine influences, the Baroque, etc); the diffusion and, often, the persistence of social‐cultural traditions that resist the influence of modernisation, are today—just as they were at the time of the Grand Tour—factors of strong appeal for the Southern regions. Today, the “capital cities” in Southern Italy are the main historical destinations of the early years of tourism, especially for foreign demand: besides Naples and Palermo, cities such as Taormina, Sorrento, Capri and Ischia, or destinations of cultural tourism such as Agrigento and Siracusa stand out.

Upon the changes that have taken place in the tourist sector since the 7 990s, the SMTEs and the destinations where they operate are called to reflect on the opportunity to redefine the strategic and organizational assets that have distinguished them until now in order to respond to new needs and desires coming from a more segmented demand side. This paper presents the results of a research project conducted in the Dolomites, the most important alpine area in terms of numbers of tourists, representative of a community tourist destination and where the tourists do not defer to intermediaries to organize the vacation (do‐it‐yourself tourists). The Dolomites are now in the “mature” phase of the development life cycle and as such need a new approach to the market in order to maintain loyalty among current visitors and to gain loyalty in new tourist segments. The research was done in the summer 2001 and winter 2001–2002 by administering 5,000 online questionnaires to a representative sampling of “do‐it‐yourself” tourists. The objective was to study the decision‐making and behavioural models of do‐it‐yourself tourists and to build profiles of tourists who choose this destination. From these profiles it is possible to identify strategies that the SMTEs and the alpine destination as a whole could undertake to achieve the goals described above. The research highlights the importance for SMTEs to overcome the entrepreneurial spontaneity and to adopt an informed and planned business strategy. In this scenario the Regional Tourist Boards emerge as important actors that can play a key role in meta‐management.

Destination management is in urgent need of analytical and policy tools, and even more so in the context of tourism for development programs. Understanding both structural elements and dynamic processes are essential. This chapter describes a model of destinations which considers three types of structural components: factors/resources, attractors (of tourism demand), and support systems. It analyzes as well the optimizing behavior of destination stakeholders, both endogenous and exogenous, as a way to understand destination dynamics. The model can be applied in the strategic positioning of destinations as well as in achieving competitiveness and sustainability—ultimately contributing to development—through tourism policy plans and governance processes. The model was born in the context of a European Eureka–ComTur research project, and has been tested in a variety of destinations.

This paper presents the UE‐Eurostat methodology to design and implement a system of surveys of inbound tourism. It has been thought for the homogeneisation of the information systems of the EU countries and for the development of the cooperation in the field of tourism statistics between the European Union and other relevant extra‐Europe regions. Furthermore, the methodology wants to give a common framework of analysis for the collection and processing of comparable statistics at each territorial level. The general research process has been split up into nine fundamental steps which represent the stages a researcher has to follow in order to obtain reliable data on visitor flows, visitors' and trip characteristics, consumption behaviour and opinions and impressions on the trip and the visit. It has been implemented for closed areas (areas with political borders, e.g. a country, geographical borders, e.g. a island, artificial borders, e.g. a museum, a theme park, an archaeological area) and open areas (a macro‐region, a region, a single tourist destination, e.g. a city, or tourist site, e.g. a square).

The purpose of this article is to describe the characteristics and the consumption behaviour of tourists coming from different countries and choosing different holiday typologies (cultural, seaside, mountains, etc.), by evaluating their expenditure in terms of consumption functions and productive sectors. The analysis — which uses the results of the survey on tourist expenditure carried out in the Veneto region, with particular reference to international tourism, from May 1994 to April 1995 —, can be suitably extended over the local scale. A multisectoral‐biregional input output model (VERDITOUR) has been implemented to measure the economic role of each segment and the plot of interactions going from tourist expenditure habits to the tourism industry.