La competitività degli ecosistemi multi-locale di servizio: il caso dei servizi turistici.

Abstract The increased diversity of demand for tourist services and the growing global competition require continuous rethinking of the trade-off between specialization and breadth of the offer for the management of the tourist service "long tail". This makes clear the need to (re)define the concept of competitiveness of tourist destinations and its drivers, including consideration of a demand characterized by an increasing variety and differentiation, whose satisfaction requires the aggregation of different components of offer, also multi-local. It is know that the competition in the tourism sector does not only occur between individual players/locations, but increasingly between multi-territorial systems whose competitiveness can not be assessed as a simple sum of "individual quality ", but as an " aggregated or added quality" greater than their linear summation, the level of which comes from the consistency of quality system and quality of each service. Touristic multilocal ecosystems (TmLES) can take different levels and size depending on the competitive position sought and that is at an intermediate level between the country system(macro-area) and the touristic destination (micro-area). In this contest the companies must be able to act transversely between micro systems, namely the individual enterprise or network, and meso systems, such as multi-local territorial systems, using new strategic and operational analytical tools, which in particular enhance the quality and positioning of individual components, but also (and above) of the total of "multi-local ecological system". This thesis examines these issues, reassembling the main contributions of the literature in aintegrated model for the analysis of competitiveness of TmLES, introducing as an additional driver of the tourist competitiveness the ICT. This model has been given a more complex mathematical structure by using the Instrument for Structural Equation Modelling. This methodology allows, starting from the assessment of key stakeholders, to determine a variable called "Competitiveness", which is quantitatively observable and comparable. The model is tested through an empirical application in reference to Lake Garda aimed ESTmL to highlight the major competitive drivers and any multilocal gaps.