Journal of Tourism & Hospitality
Open Access

Abstract

Networking and Cooperation Practices in Italian Touristic Business

Marco Valeri and Leslie Fadlon

Purpose: The aim of the paper is to study the factors influencing the development process of networking collaborations between small and medium-sized in Italian touristic system. These businesses must choose the network because of the difficulty of growing and because they need to achieve competitive advantage.

Design/Methodology/Approach: The survey was carried out by administering a questionnaire addressed to a sample of travel agencies and tour operator affiliated to FIAVET (Italian Federation of Associations of Travel and Tourism Company). The analysis sample is made from 1.034 small and medium – sized enterprises.

Originality/Value sustainability: This paper aims to contribute to the recent studies on the management and governance of small and medium-sized tourism enterprises, with the effort to improve the competitiveness of small and micro enterprises. These studies are trying to identify the most suitable business formula in order to achieve the competitive advantage.

Findings: A network consists of actors who sometimes belong to related economic sectors. It represents an organizational model that can overcome the difficulties caused by the tourism offer fragmentation that exists in Italy and abroad.

Limits: The narrowness of the sample and the economic sector of the businesses interviewed suggest a number of new directions of scientific research that have not yet been adequately studied for tourism studies.