The Company Clusters Power in Tourism Destinations: The Network Configuration and the Business Organisation

Abstract

Better and greater coordination and integration between companies are essential for tourist destination development processes improving competitiveness. Moreover, it is difficult to imagine that all companies can cooperate. In this way, we can imagine finding a group of companies that, for several reasons, decide to cooperate, creating some clusters as small groups. Companies with stable connections with other clusters or relevant companies could be relevant and central to Tourism Destination (TD) management. In this way, the knowledge of network articulation seems to be critical for TD management business dynamics. In most cases, the relationships are hidden and not formalised, increasing the complexity in TD analysis. The presence of clusters is possibly vitrificated using the Social Network Analysis (SNA) methodology. The present work could be framed in cooperative networks since it analyses the companies’ commercial networks and clusters groups. The article focuses on how groupings of small firms can govern Tourism Destinations. This paper uses network indexes and metrics to emphasise structural features regarding the density and centrality of relationships. As the main result, in the case study analysed, there is a relational framework where three clusters of companies with a high density of exchanges emerge. These groups can influence the tourism business at the destination.