Governance Factors That Influence the Internationalization of Tourism Destinations: The Perspective of Portuguese DMOs

Introduction

This chapter aims to present the model explaining the governance of tourist destinations, with a view to their internationalization.

In addition, the relationships between the factors associated with this model are clarified and the steps inherent to the various validation studies of the instrument built for this purpose are explained, namely content, construct and reliability validation.

This study is part of a broader investigation, which proposes a model for the internationalization of destinations, in which the systemic perspective of tourism is strengthened, due to the relationship between the dimensions of territory, product, governance model and function of Destination Management Organizations (DMOs) (Mira, & Breda, 2019). The results indicate that each of the second order constructs (dimensions) significantly reflects the latent variable it sets out from (‘internationalization of destinations’). In addition, the inter-correlation between the scales and the constituent factors indicates that the strongest associations are established between the ‘territory’ and ‘product’ dimensions, as well as between ‘governance’ and ‘DMOs’. The connection between the territory’s economy and the product’s competitiveness is confirmed, as well as between DMOs and governance of the network destination, a link also defended at the theoretical level. Therefore, the DMOs and the network governance of destinations integrate the various elements of the tourism system, guarantee their coordination and the involvement of stakeholders in this process (Mira, & Breda, 2019; Valeri, 2016; Valeri and Baggio, 2020a; 2020b; 2020c; 2021; Baggio and Valeri, 2020). The perspective that the governance of the territory facilitates its organization as learning and innovation systems inspired by the uniqueness and identity of destinations is justified.