The knowledge on the tourist actors of the territory and their relations is a basic element for the active management of any tourist destination, since they have a special importance for the strategies and the actions that must be undertaken to adapt to the new conditions of the context. These conditions are characterized, among other things, by the disintermediation and the new habits of the tourist demand, in which the experience, the major activity in the destination and the discovery and selforganization are key factors. After reviewing the main features of accessible tourism and its situation in the current world context, this paper will examine the correlation in three specific Mediterranean countries (France, Spain and Morocco) between the level of development of accessible tourism and the relational dynamics generated by the actors involved in it. For this particular purpose, the Analysis of Social Networks and the Analysis of Contents of Social Networks will be applied.

In the last decade the mountains of Cuneo have met difficulties in attracting young tourists. Despite the large literature on drivers considered in the choice of a destination, a few contributions focus on the motivations that account for the choice on the part of young people. This paper, based on the identification of drivers of attractiveness of a tourist destination, investigates how the level of satisfaction of young people influences the quality of the offered services. This objective is achieved by means of a literature review on young-tourist destination and on the measurement of tourist satisfaction, the creation of an adapted SERVQUAL model able to measure the gap between Cuneo’s youth priorities and satisfaction. This is possible throughout an explorative study performed by means of a questionnaire submitted to 200 Young tourists. Finally, paths of action have been suggested to provincial Bodies throughout a focus group. Results show how young tourists consider very important: safety, hygiene and intact nature. This is only an exploratory study applied to a single case study but could be applied at other levels (urban, national…) and implemented in comparison with benchmarks.

From his publication, the Tourist, Dean Maccannell has shed light on an entire generation. His legacy opened a new focus of attention in the cultural studies of geography, territory, authenticity and mobility. However, his negative view about tourism as an alienable activity paved the ways for the trivialization of tourism as a scientific discipline. This essay review not only is aimed at reviewing deeply from various works, ranging from the Tourist to Empty meeting grounds, but also we focus on the methodological inconsistencies of structuralism to be applied on tourist-related studies. Our thesis is that Maccannell misunderstood the real nature of tourism and its difference from the tourist destination. His outcomes are illustrative to examine the life of tourist destinations but are invalidated at time of studying tourism from a macro-sociological perspective. Maccannell is a hero of tourism applied research because of his merit; our efforts are placed to debunk his contributions.

In the current economic crisis, nations try to identify those sectors that can best help them find the path back to growth. Spain hopes that tourism will play this role. The problem is that the industry has been losing competitiveness over the last few years as a result of the structural problems arising from mass, low-cost tourism. Innovation seems to be the only way out of this morass and of improving competitiveness and leading the country out of recession. This paper looks at the relationship between innovation and competitiveness by identifying the nature and degree of innovation applied by Spanish firms in the tourism sector. This fieldwork found ten dimensions of innovation. Analysis of these revealed that Spanish companies tend to see innovation in a reactive way (cost-cutting, staff cuts, greater management and process control) rather than in an active fashion (creating products, re-engineering the business model, internationalisation). Thus the study makes both academic and practical contributions. On the one hand, the empirical work allows in the management field of the various tourism sub-sectors relating innovation with competitiveness — in which the former is vital for the latter (Larios, 1999; Porter, 1990). On the other hand, given the difficulties for companies in general and tourism firms in particular in articulating an innovation policy, the findings yield innovation models that could be applied to other Spanish and European companies.