engleski

The Tourist Destination as a Socio-economic System

Production processes are linked not only to individual enterprises, but also to the local environment to which they belong. Entities, individuals and organisations, and the private and public sectors are all brought together within the local system to interact, make decisions and formulate strategies in a context that is concurrently cooperative and competitive. There are as many definitions of the tourist destination as there are authors. Nevertheless, it seems we can all agree that the term destination denotes an optimally united and market-oriented area in which, by developing important and dominant abilities, conscientious efforts are made to create the prerequisites required to achieve superior tourism performance in the long run in comparison to that of the competition. The tourist destination has become the fundamental institutional framework in formulating tourism development. It is the competitive unit of the tourism-receiving area, complete with distinctive features, functions and a destination product, and as such should be considered as a socio-economic system. According to the systems theory, all the elements or subsystems of a given system are mutually dependent and their development is based on their interaction with the integral environment. Unfortunately, coordination between the most important subsystems in the destination is often inadequate resulting in the absence of synergic effects and the lack of competition based on innovations. This paper focuses on identifying the functions of the tourist destination and on underlining the so-called public coordination-related functions, which we consider to be the fundamental prerequisite to achieving synergic performance in the tourist destination as a socio-economic system.

tourism destination as a socio-economic system; competitiveness; coordination; synergic effect

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