Relationship networks: Cross-fertilizing the knowledge on tourism destinations and seaports' competitiveness

The present research is aimed at cross-fertilizing the tourism and seaport literatures on the specific topic of relationship networks for competitiveness as this can favor the spreading of practices and can create a collaborative environment to solve problems that cannot be solved by one sector alone. In particular, it is believed that the knowledge transfer among different industries on specific and challenging topics, such as this of the competitiveness, can really contribute to the sustainable development of the modern society. The final aim is to identify and promote common tools for the sustainable development of both tourism destinations and seaports in the city. The paper is of theoretical nature and develops an extensive literature review of relationship networks and competitiveness in tourism destination and port. At this end, the analysis will focus on the coordination mechanisms of the relationships at the dyad, supply chain and cluster's level. A further element will be assessment of the factors contributing to the success of network's governance models, in terms of performance and more in general, of sustainability. All the reviewed papers will be regrouped according to the features under investigation and a comparison between the tourism and port literatures will be performed in order to identify commonalities and differences on specific critical issues. The papers under review will be those published in the last two decades in International Academic Journals. The results of the literature review will then be presented and discussed in focus groups with experts in tourism destination and seaport in order to identify effective modalities of cross-fertilizing and transferring knowledge from one sector to the other.