Destination Unknown. Is There any Economics Beyond Tourism Areas?

In recent years, several papers have been focussing on various aspects of the tourism destination. The destination is a central issue within tourism studies, embodying in one single concept all the specific and problematic features of tourism, such as its systemic nature, in which “space” plays a fundamental role. In this paper we argue that is in the analysis of destinations that tourism economics shapes itself as an independent discipline within applied economics. Firstly, destinations are neither microeconomic agents nor macroeconomic aggregates, but territorial systems supplying at least one tourism product (a bundle of goods and services) able to satisfy the complex needs of the tourism demand. Secondly, the economic analysis of destinations identifies two specific theorems, the love of variety theorem and the coordination theorem which allow to interpret the tourism destination as a particular type of district, sharing at the same time some of the features of the industrial and of the cultural district.