ANALYZING COLLABORATIVE MARKETING NETWORKS FROM HOSPITALITY BUSINESS PERSPECTIVES

Abstract

Abstract A process of joint decision making among autonomous and key stakeholders of an interorganisational domain to resolve problems of the domain and/or to manage issues related to the domain. Collaboration is defined as the key strategy for tourism destinations and managements to be used for short resources and for meaningful and holistic experiences to meet tourists’ needs. Within the tourism industry, this might involve joint decision making among all those parties having an interest or stake in tourism destination development and marketing. Networking is crucial in mobilizing information and resources as well as co-operation among tourism businesses. The studies conducted showed that in destinations in competitive and complicated environments such as tourism, businesses often develop collaborative relationships in order to gain rivalry advantages and consequently benefit from network advantages of businesses operating destinations. Due to this importance, collaboration at tourism destinations has been a topic investigated frequently since 90s. However, most of these studies focused on collaboration among destinations and businesses at destinations with a more static and autonomous point of view. Today, it is a general-accepted approach where the activities of businesses are influenced by the social context where also the other businesses are embedded. Therefore, it is accepted that using methods focusing on interaction creating a certain structure and framework is appropriate to examine the collaboration between a destination and its actors such as the network approach. Nevertheless, it is observed that although the number of studies focusing on social network approach for collaboration at tourism sector, the number of studies are still limited. Hence, the aim of the study is to analyze the collaborative network among hospitality businesses, public institutions and nongovernmental organizations in Eskisehir, which is developing in terms of tourism, within the scope of marketing efforts of businesses operating in tourism sector. In this study, the general collaborative network among hospitality business and other tourism business (catering and travel agencies), public institutions related with the sector, associations and NOG examined. Ucinet and Netdraw were used for developing and visualizing social network. Degree-centrality and betwenness centrality were employed to analyze the data.