Abstract
Tourism destinations bring together multiple independent firms that offer complementary and substitute goods and services, perceived as a unitary product by tourists. In this context, coordination plays a crucial role in overcoming the limits of tourism supply and meeting tourism demand, ultimately enhancing the destination’s competitiveness. A recent review by Messori and Volo (forthcoming) sthe literature on collaborative relational dynamics among tourism firms to facilitate an operationalization of the construct, considering both tourism management and economic perspectives. Despite the increasing attention, studies on coordination in tourism and hospitality research remain scarce (Zhang et al., 2009). In particular, a tool to measure the degree of tourism interfirm coordination within a destination is still lacking. This study seeks to fill this gap by proposing a conceptual framework that constitutes the starting point of a fifteen-step procedure to develop a composite indicator (CI) for tourism interfirm coordination. The conceptual framework aims to clearly define the phenomenon to be measured and its components, paving the way for the identification of the individual indicators and their relative weights. The assessment of the coordination literature and the related dimensions identified by Messori and Volo (forthcoming) are used to propose the conceptual framework. The development of CI is based on Mendola and Volo’ s (2017) expansion of the OECD and JRC’s (2008) guidelines for constructing CIs, which are widely used in the scientific literature with over 3,485 citations on Google Scholar. This systematic framework allows for a holistic conceptualization of tourism interfirm coordination and facilitates the subsequent construction of the CI. Its six constituent dimensions pertain to proximity, associationism, competitive advantage, comparative advantage, co-production, and contextual factors. From these six dimensions a second order hierarchy comprising 36 subdimensions is derived, with each subdimension matched to a corresponding indicator. The CI will be functional for measuring coordination as a multidimensional phenomenon and for practitioners and policymakers’ interpretation of the complex information it encompasses. Concurrently, the CI will enable a detailed analysis of each constituent dimension and facilitate an assessment of their influence on overall coordination. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first attempt in the tourism and hospitality literature to identify the dimensions underlying tourism firms' coordination and consolidate them into a single measure.