Cultural tourism management for overcoming seasonality: an empirical evidence

This paper deals with destination management issues, within the debate about the relation between cultural tourism and seasonal adjustment of tourist flows. The research aimed to empirically test some managerial choices theorized by the main literature as those capable of increasing tourist flows in off-season, such as: cultural offer, short breaks, co-marketing with low-cost airlines and systemic organization of public and private actors. To this end, the research based on the action research approach and followed a two-steps methodology. The first step concerned the design and implementation of a pilot project, called “Lecce capital of weekend”, focusing on all the above mentioned choices; the second one involved a survey carried out by the analysis of 2.590 interviews, structured on four samples (visitors, hospitality, traders and travel agencies), useful to define the features of captured tourist demand and the additional tourist flow generated by the pilot project. Finally, it verified its economic impact on local economy by using I-O method. The achieved results show that such managerial choices are able to determine an increase in tourist flows in off-season having a positive economic impact on local economy. The paper is divided into four parts. After a brief introduction on the subject matter (1), it exposes the theoretical framework of reference (2), describes the research design (3) and discusses the achieved results (4). Finally, it reports some conclusions about the managerial and theoretical implications for further advances in the field.