Tourism destinations as Innovative clusters: an opportunity to make a destination more attractive: Case of Agadir city

Abstract

The spatial expansion of tourism and the growing diversification of this activity in the world to create opportunities for countries, regions and communities to seek to bring about their development. A cluster is a progressive form of business network, which has strong business objectives focusing on improving sales and profits. It makes the exchange of information and technology possible, encouraging different ways of co-ordination and collaboration within them. Clustering is a process that enables the participants to exploit their synergies and the complementarities between their outputs, involving several benefits. (E.C., 2003). Clusters are vital for regional development increase the competitiveness, the productivity and local businesses’ critical mass.In an era where tourism is suffering from the pandemic effects, our paper highlights the role of actors networking on tourism destination attractiveness.

Limited research has investigated on tourism clusters; this paper fills this gab by proposing an Innovative tourism cluster as a framework-providing destination with innovative opportunities and solutions to operate in an attractive tourism environment.

Hence our main paper question: “what is the role of actors networking, as an innovative tourism cluster, one destination tourism attractiveness?” Our methodology started with a review of relevant literature on innovative tourism cluster, and yet the literature in this respect is scarce and there is a need for more research. Then a qualitative method is undertaken via interviews with different tourism actors. The empirical results validate the need to apply a new framework to develop tourism attractiveness. The paper also provides a contribution to the assessment of tourism industry clusters.

Keywords: Innovative cluster, tourism, destination, attractiveness, Morocco

JEL Classification: L83, Z30

Paper type: Empirical research