The Role of Cooperative Strategies in Destinations’ Competitiveness in a Turbulent Environment

Destination management is a key issue of all overall models of destinations’ competitiveness and seems to be a “panacea” in those countries, which introduces the tool-system in the near past, so as to support the destinations (national/regional or local level) to keep up with keen competition, mainly in the Central-Eastern and Balkan region. The culture of cooperation holds difficulties in this region. The lack of trust as well as cooperation in bigger groups can be drawn back to the distrust business culture typical in these countries, and the so-called group collectivism (a phenomenon of building trust in small groups based on personal contacts). The main focus of this paper is to summarize the theoretical approaches to destinations’ competitiveness and destination management and to summarize the results of two case studies concerning a destination facing keen competition or escaping from a decline. The main research question is: “What kind of role can (could) destination management play in destinations’ competitiveness in a turbulent environment?”. As a result of this research, the differentiated analysis of management-oriented view of destinations’ competitiveness was carried out, as well as crystallizing the key success/failure factors of destination management. 

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