Tourism product development and product diversification in destinations

Tourism Diversification and Its Implications for Smart Specialisation

“…In the service industries, diversification is associated with value creation or risk minimization at the customer end [52]. In tourism, diversification offers varied and customized experience products, flexibility in the planning and design of the destination experience and competitiveness through creating more complementarities, synergies, and economies of scope [31]. In many Middle Eastern countries, e.g., the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, these policies propose alternatives for non-renewable oil and gas resources [53].…”

“…Diversification strategies have limited influence on the balance between concentration and diversification because there are many other factors and ad-hoc decisions. For example, they are often determined by uncoordinated individual market-based decisions rather than by coordinated destination policies and market interventions [31]. Implementing these strategies challenges tourism SMEs to gain competitive advantages or else they will suffer from poor economies of scale and scope [54].…”

“…Market and product diversification strategies encourage growth through the development of new and authentic products [31,58]. Often, they take on risks because of the involvement of high investment costs, overstretching of financial resources, the construction of a confusing image, reproduction and standardization of the tourism experience; moreover, they depend on managers' motivation for creating synergies in the value chain [58] and advocate acquiring new skills, techniques, structures, competencies and resources and/or facilities at the firm level [59].…”

“…Consequently, these changes required diversification in terms of adapting and/or acquiring new technologies, knowledge and technical skills to develop new products and cater for the needs of new markets including professional and training of current and new members of staff [61]. Market diversification can also be used as a strategic tool in avoiding conflict and tension, such as the development of international tourism and territorial enclaves in third world countries and Muslim countries, where the tourism offering is separate geographically between international and domestic markets [31]. Related and unrelated strategies can guide the development of a systemic approach to regional diversification including links between firms, institutions, and other knowledge actors as well as between sectors, which may diverse into offerings new products and markets in line with their marketing strategies, risk assessment and identification of place based resources.…”

“…The limited research on tourism diversification remains fragmented with a main focus on the regional scale; Erkus [13,[31][32][33], very little attention to the national scale focusing on success factors of tourism diversification [34] and some scope on the international scale in the context of export diversification [35,36]. Studies on tourism and smart specialisation have only emerged recently in the context of tourism sustainable development [12,37,38] and sustainable economic growth and resilience [10,39].…”