Abstract
One form of cycle tourism can be represented features tourism that focuses on the relation between biking and the discovery of a territory. Geared toward forms of holiday that allow for the low consumption of natural resources and a connection with the landscape, cycle tourism represents a concrete expression of sustainable tourism. As an emerging phenomenon in Italy, cycle tourism requires further understanding in order to identify methods of development and applicable business models. The aim of this paper is to explore the characteristics of cycle tourism’s development in northern Italy in order to identify the links that exist between sustainability and the group of cycle tourists who prefer to spend their holidays discovering little-known or remote territories. For this study, we selected three different destinations in sensitive mountain areas that converge on the common goal to use cycling to rejuvenate the tourism sector. It has been found that the development of cycle tourism in areas not characterized by mass tourism, such as those considered here, is economically, socially, and environmentally beneficial. The business models through which cycle tourism usually develops include a bottom up approach or a top down approach, involving the cooperation of several local destination stakeholders.
Highlights
In recent years, the tourism sector has been located between the demand and supply sides with changes that focus attention on binomial territory–tourism as a relevant force for developing tourism offers and increasing competitiveness
Having outlined the state of current literature regarding slow tourism and cycle tourism as one form of the former, this paper aims to understand whether the general principles that have been identified in the literature apply to the Italian case, where cycle tourism started to develop only recently
The principles we were able to identify in the specific cases under investigation here are physical integrity (PI), biological diversity (PD), resource efficiency (RE), cultural richness (CR), local control (LC), community wellbeing (CW), social equity (SE), visitor fulfilment (VF), and local prosperity (LP)
Summary
The tourism sector has been located between the demand and supply sides with changes that focus attention on binomial territory–tourism as a relevant force for developing tourism offers and increasing competitiveness. Tourists are looking for a complex and profound experience to better appreciate the elements of local identities and the unique landscapes of a precise territory [6,7]. They travel for a unique tourism experience that differs significantly from mass tourism experiences [8], looking for traditional characteristics of territories based on tangible and intangible elements [9,10], and stakeholders relationships [11] in a multi-purpose perspective [12,13,14]
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