Determinants of cooperation among hotels in Venice: A network approach

Tourism is a vital economic driver, especially in Italy, where it accounted for nearly 13% of the gross domestic product in 2023 (OpenEconomics, 2023). It demands effective governance, defined as a way of coordination or interaction between destination entities operating in the third sector, to be successful and competitive (Czernek-Marszałek, 2021). In tourism destinations, cooperation between the involved stakeholders is necessary to achieve competitiveness and sustainability (Fyall and Garrod, 2020). Czernek (2013, p. 84) states that cooperation in tourism is “a form of voluntary joint actions in which autonomous stakeholders engage in an interactive process, using shared rules, norms and structures, to act and decide on issues related to tourism development in the region”.In this study, we apply network models to explore the following research question: Which factors determine the collaboration between hotels in Venice? The network model approach allows accounting for the dependence among the collaboration ties and offers a quantitative approach which controls the effect of one factor on the tie formation for other factors.