Recent developments in destination management suggest that administrative divisions may be misleading as a unit of decision making for tourism planning and management, since they may comprise several areas with different tourism functionality. Identifying homogenous areas of tourism activity and delimiting their boundaries can enhance the utility of information for smart management purposes. The objective of this paper is to highlight the relevance of the geographical dimension of smart destinations by showing how functional areas can be delimited and how this smaller unit of analysis can improve destination management in the new context of improved availability of data and smart decisions supported by technology. The paper illustrates its key ideas with an application to the island of Gran Canaria.
Delimitation of the boundaries of local tourism destinations has been proposed as a useful tool to obtain spatially-detailed statistical information to improve their decision-making and management. In the case of the Canary Islands, a leading tourism region, expert consensus supported by criteria based on supply characteristics has been used to set the boundaries of local destinations. This paper aims to analyse the characteristics of these established local destinations and test if statistical methods may provide better or different results than expert consensus from the perspective of destinations’ internal homogeneity and the differences between them. After applying descriptive and analytical statistical methods, the results confirm the evidence found in other delimitation exercises in social sciences. The consensus of experts, or subjectivity, provides consistent results that are, by and large, confirmed by statistical analysis. While statistical methods can provide new insights for delimitation, pure statistical methods can sometimes be misleading if stakeholders’ knowledge is not considered.
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