Management of sustainable tourism destination through stakeholder cooperation

1.INTRODUCTIONTourism destination is a wider integrated space, which builds its tourism integrity on a concept of cumulative attractions which, due to the impression they offer and their additional tourism infrastructure, make them become tourism hotspots (Pirjevec & Kesar, 2002). The importance of accumulation of attractions in a destination presents a challenge to space management. The key question is how many attractions a certain space needs and what is the maximum intensity of tourist gathering in the space. Therefore, the challenge to tourism destination management is high. As Manente & Minghetti (2006: 23) point out, a destination is essentially a "group of actors linked by mutual relationships with specific rules, where the action of each actor influences those of the others so that common objectives must be defined and attained in a coordinated way" (Fyall et al., 2012). In the time of extreme competition among tourism destinations present on tourism market nowadays, success can be reached only through a cooperation of all participants in the destination offer. To accomplish this objective, many destinations have introduced destination marketing companies (DMC) or destination management organisations (DMO) aiming to join the opposed interests of the destination participants. Accordingly, a number of studies have focused on DMCs & DMOs and their roles in destination-level collaborations (Fyall et al., 2012). Due to a dynamic and continues change of market conditions, tourist boards had to evolve from entities and organizations dealing mostly with promotion of destinations to destination marketing organizations, and eventually to destination management organizations (Serra et al., 2016). It is very important for these increasing demands not to result in the desire for a short-term gain through harming the overall sustainable growth and destination development. It is necessary to optimize both economic and social progress of the destination and all of its parts at the same time respecting ecological restraints. Porter & Kramer (2011) state that a "shared value involves creating economic value in a way that also creates value for society by addressing its needs and challenges ". A conceptual change is taking place in the last decades - related to the change of destination marketing companies towards being administration-destination management organizations which manage complex private and public partnership - has resulted in their moving closer to public administration. Public and private partnerships and decrease of business entities competition within a destination are possible through creating common values in which all parties make a concession for the purpose of economic and social benefits (Vaidyanathan & Scott, 2012). Therefore, DMOs have to be related stronger with local authorities and the private sector in order to create public-private consortiums (Socher, 2000; Serra at al., 2016). It is necessary to have a quality and systematic destination management, in order to create a competitive and sustainable tourism destination. It implies a long-term process of change management, which includes optimal economic development of a destination, a higher level of life standard, ecological preservation, social and cultural heritage preservation and its valorisation with the aim of economic and general development of a tourism destination (Blazevic, 2007: 218; Pearce, 2015). Destination management is being perceived as a virtual organisational network of independent organisations with certain common resources and business goals, and with common management for all segments (Magas, 2008: 11; Bartoluci, 2013: 164). Such management coordinates those tourism functions that cannot be carried out by individual offer holders, because they have stronger common performances and better perspectives in realisation of their goals. Chen and Paulraj (2004) claim that the success of organizations operating within tourism destinations depends on the re-orientation of their organizational strategies toward the achievement of a 'collaborative advantage' rather than a 'competitive advantage'. …