Since 2001, tourism went through different and difficult contexts, which spanned from the attacks on the World Trade Center to the outbreak of lethal viruses such as Ebola. Some specialists claimed the need of adopting new conceptual models to understand these new risks while moving resources to mitigate them (Mawby, 2000; Reisinger and Mavondo, 2005; Mansfeld and Pizam, 2006; Larsen, Brun and Øgaard, 2009; Tarlow, 2014). The risk perception theory not only played a leading role in the multiplication of new emergent research just after the turn of the century but also notably resonated in fields of tourism management. Per these specialists, the tourism industry faces cyclical crises which should be anticipated and mitigated (Blake and Sinclair, 2003; Seraphin, Butcher & Korstanje, 2016; Seraphin et al., 2018a, 2018b). It was unfortunate that the efforts of the Obama administration to deter terrorist activities were short-run and finally failed. Terrorism, as well as other unseen risks, targeted new European cities and tourist destinations, placing the industry between the wall and the deep blue sea. K. Hannam (2009) vaticinated, in this context, the end of tourism while J. Urry signals to the change of paradigms for a sociology beyond society (Sheller and Urry, 2006; Urry, 2012).
To some extent, the failure of risk perception theory and the precautionary doctrine paved the way for the rise of a new model that commoditizes the affected site once the disaster takes a hit. Some experts emphasized new morbid forms of tourism which helped communities in the post-recovery facet (Korstanje, 2016; Séraphin et al., 2018c). The classic product of sun and beach set the pace to darker tendencies which ranged from dark tourism to slum tourism. Those visitors motivated to travel to these sites are interested to interpret their own lives through the Others’ death or pain (Seaton, 1996; Stone and Sharpley, 2008). No less true is that the tourism industry not only seems to be resilient to risky situations but also commoditizes catastrophes and disasters as dark forms of modern spectacles (Korstanje, 2016; Tzanelli, 2016). In this respect, the present chapter interrogates the radical morbid metamorphosis of tourism, which far from disappearing, re-elaborates new discourses revolving around the sense of place. As stated, John Urry anticipated to this situation arguing that tourism is ripe for the disappearance. As an invention of industrial logic, tourism rapidly connected far away zones, cities and cultures which otherwise would keep separated for centuries. Tourism and technology are inextricably intertwined. Today, the same technology that fostered tourism worldwide is mining it from the inside out. Hundreds – if not thousands – of cyber-tourists consume dark landscapes, which are characterized by cities devastated by war or sites of mass death from a PC station, while others enter places that otherwise would remain inexpugnable for them. The sense of physical movement has changed forever. To put this in slightly other terms, dark tourism isolates and replaces the tourists in the virtuality of cyber-space. This begs a more than interesting point: we live in a world where tourists do not travel anymore. This happens because the experience has certainly replaced the physical movement as the key element that molds tourism (Kaelber, 2007). This and other interesting connotations are placed under critical scrutiny in the present chapter. The importance these types of new tourism have received in the Academy is directly proportional to the changes the industry is facing. Still further, the question of whether doom-tourism consists in moving to sites or destinations which are in the bias of disappearance, suggests two important assumptions. On one hand, this industrial world Urry mentioned has been changed by a decentralized and chaotic form of production and accumulation. On another hand, the process of deindustrialization, adjoined to the rise of individualism, is creating a form of consumptions that are unique, special, and cannot be repeated in any way. This is consistent to what Yves Michaud dubbed as “new luxury”, which means the replication of patterns that, far from being communicated to others – as the classic travel stories – are tended to reinforce pleasure-maximization and egocentrism (Michaud, 2013).
It is almost impossible o synthesize Urry’s legacy (and of course his proficient research and prolificacy) in a couple of sections. Doubtless, Urry not only illuminated the paths for many young researchers but introduced the conception of gaze within tourism debates. He coins the term Tourist Gaze to denote a sort of engagement between the self and its landscape. Per his viewpoint, the classic patterns of industrialism set the pace to new cultural consumptions which are systematically tailored to the agency (Urry, 1992a). To put this in other terms, Urry agrees with Baudrillard on the following axiom: tourism exhibits a vital force that integrates the citizens into the logic of consumption, leading the revitalization of psychological frustrations. Nonetheless, Urry realizes that the classic behaviours of holidaymakers in the nineteenth century are being gradually articulated into the constellations of different experiences. By the orchestration of countless (fabricated) landscapes, tourists actively select a subjective experience which is systematically replicated by a much deeper cultural matrix. In this way, Urry clarifies, we witness the appearance of a type of post-tourism. It is important not to lose the sight Urry confronts with Dean MacCannell, who considers tourism a type of post auratic force. In fact, for Urry, the individual experience cannot be unilaterally imposed to the agency. Rather, the tourist looks for an experience which is adapted to its previous cognitive organization. The gaze was originally introduced in the social science by Michel Foucault, who was obsessed with understanding the intervention of medical reason in the society. Urry instead describes the tourist gaze as the intersection of a new emerging aesthetic, which results from a reflexibility process, and the adaptation of psychical environment by the expansion of technology. The mobilities, as well as the tourist gaze, advances through the environment consuming not only natural resources but also commoditizing cultures. The culture of entertainment and the quest of new experiences demands always new landscapes to be consumed (gazed), in which case it places the natural environment in serious jeopardy (Urry, 1990, 1992a, 1992b; Lash and Urry, 1993; Urry, 2001, 2016). In a seminal book edited jointly with Chris Rojek, Urry (2002) holds the thesis that the system of production that historically characterized modernity is facing radical shifts towards a new decentralized form of production where the sign and reflexibility occupied central positions. Originally, editors are intended to frame an accurate definition of tourism that helps other researchers to overcome the fragmentation of meanings. Around the term “tourist” many connotations emerge such as holidaymakers, sightseers, visitors and so forth. Despite the multiplication of publications, Rojek and Urry remarked, little is known about the nature of tourism without mentioning its connection with mobilities. Another additional problem appears to be the position of the economic-centered paradigm that defines tourism as an economic force alone. Their book Touring Cultures comes from the needs of both the positivist operationalization and the economic-centered paradigm, as editors in their foreword contend. Until the rise and expansion of capitalism, tourism and culture were distinguished as two different institutions. Here Urry and Rojek identify two types of modernities. While modernity 1 signals to the order of things as the result of a universal causality, the modernity 2 falls to the “disorderliness of life”. After all, the latter showed how rational decisions may have irrational effects in our daily lives.
Per their definition, the modern economy not only comprises the circulation of objects and goods, but also the disposition of cultural landscapes as commodities too. However, these resulting circuits of exchange are not static, they are culturally “encoded” toward a complex and embroiled notion of “hybridity”. They put as an example the history of Irish Americans who today evolved into a hybrid form. The process of culturization not only toys with the belief that tourism makes people better, but there is an increasing manipulation of signs disposed of by the marketing to furnish, decorate and embellish some destinations. At the time of exploring modern tourism, social scientists should operate within the frames of an economy of signs, where a hybridized cultural product is externally manipulated and imposed on visitors; hence, in the next years, editors vaticinate more abstract version of tourism such as cyber or virtual tourism would be brought into the foreground (Rojek and Urry, 2002).
As the previous backdrop, the society or the economy of signs are terms Urry previously used in other works. Although not new, the terms are oriented to mark the division between the old and new modernity that altered the pre-existing paradigms. While in other centuries travellers were moved by leisure goals which oscillate from relaxing to learning about other cultures, postmodern tourists need to consume culture gazing at others as a commodity while re-accommodating their previous stereotypes. Through the tourist gaze, the self possesses what is being gazed. In this respect, Chris Rojek (2002) acknowledges that the tourist practice rests on the dichotomy between the extraordinary and the ordinary-everyday life. This binomial was culturally designed. He argues convincingly that myth and fantasy play a leading role in the configuration of the alterity and the travel. On a closer look, tourists need to travel to far-located destinations, entering in unknown areas. In doing so, the “remoteness” forces us to abandon our daily habits while we keep some speculations and allegories, and narratives about the new destination. The fact is that the tourist gaze engages with a “representational symbol” which allows us to access to hosts. In this way, the host–guest encounter would be somehow mediated by the tourist gaze. This moot point suggests that the local is unilaterally subordinated by the foreign tourists. Neither Rojek-Urry nor Urry in his entire bibliography has made an explicit annunciation on this, but what is clear is that the process of globalization has disarticulated the standardized forms of production as inherently enrooted in the core of industrialism. As a result of this, the global economies are not only more malleable, flexible and dynamic but they are subject to the creation of external signs which price the commodity.
This matter is evidently clear in a book published in 1993, in co-authorship with economist Scott Lash, which entitles Economies of Signs and Spaces. In this text, authors depart from the original contributions done by Karl Marx, who envisaged “the end of organized capitalism”. Capitalism is constantly doomed to destroy and reconstruct the same means of production that amass profit. The main goal of capitalism is far from achieving an economic stability; rather it goes to “the creative destruction”. Most probably, Lash and Urry understand the myopia of current Marxist scholars who debated the material asymmetries of capitalism from an old paradigm, the world of industrialism. Now, they said, the advanced economies are experiencing the disorganization of labour unions, whose territorialities are being withered away. The economies tend towards a global climate where there are no boundaries or frontiers while the means of production have fragmented or faced more flexible ways. The “disorganization of capitalism” derived from the expansion of global trade, foreign investment and international finance whereas more disruptive forms of violence as terrorism have suddenly surfaced. This led very well to tourism promoters and policymakers to divide the world in two, wild and safe zones. In the post-Fordist era, there are serious problems to distinguish the objects (commodities) from the peoples (embodied as labor-power). They are commodities exchanged in the marketplace. This creates a faster circulation of object-subject that emptied the economy, transforming the products simply in signs. To put this in another way, the objects are gradually emptied of content in a decentralized economy that appeals to creativity and innovation as an ongoing form of progress. However, far from being a positive action, it affirms the exhaustion of natural resources or the predatory consumption of the environment. Capitalism is out of control while the process of reflexibility mediates between the citizens and the knowledge production. The signs not only keep a primary content, which is associated with the product but to the commoditization of goods. For example, when I mean coffee I imagine Colombia; I mean whisky and the image of Scotland come to my mind. The aesthetic of capitalism, and of course tourism, aims at gazing at what is different no matter their nature. In this stage, marketing as a discipline plays a crucial role in creating the needs and the product to meet such needs at the same time. We need to talk about a global sociology of flows which involves not only tourists or migrants but also landscapes, cultures, images, money, and of course information. Technological breakthrough has accelerated the times, blurring the distinction between space and time. Epistemologically speaking, the cognitive reflexibility that characterized the industrial life is replaced by an “esthetic reflexibility” which lacks any judgment. Instead, the cognitive reflexibility refers to the relation of object and subjects, whereas the aesthetic reflexibility places the self hermeneutically in egalitarian conditions with objects. We do not understand events out of the screens in which they are exhibited. In a nutshell, global tourism depicts a scenario never seen before when consumers are gazed or consumed as objects while they are touring (Lash and Urry, 1993). In the preface, the authors mean that the culture industries engender a vertical disintegration where the products are externally designed and introduced as an opportunity for further profits and businesses. In the media, which involves TV, films, and advertising industries, the aesthetic reflexibility turns both the production of images and their pertinent consumption. Finally, the state of exploitation accelerated by this new capitalism has created an underclass, which is not allowed the benefits of mobility and consumption. This underclass is immobilized, or at the least pressed to live in the peripheral wild zones. In consequence, global capitalism shows a dark side. While thousands of tourists and visitors are actively encouraged to travel throughout the globe enjoying exotic different destinations, the presence of the underclass in the (tourist) paradise is undesired (Lash and Urry, 1993).
As stated, John Urry was a trailblazer who contributed notably to the sociology of tourism. Undoubtedly, he illustrated the change of paradigm in a new type of capitalism, more dynamic but not less dangerous for the planet. Paradoxically, the same technology that facilitated the rise of tourism in former centuries now was widely used not only to domesticate the man, but also in producing virtual forms of consumptions (like virtual tourism). Although globalization was enthusiastically embraced by many of Urry’s followers, he indeed feared that the acceleration of the economy of sign would be a direct aftermath of natural resources exhaustion. Then, his legacy should be resituated within the fields of ecology and sustainability. At the best, it is exactly what he reflects in his paper “The Complexity Turn”,published at the journal Theory, Culture and Society. Urry acknowledges two important assumptions. On one hand, there is a turn that confronts directly with the established knowledge about nature, economy and agency which very well leads towards the need to change the social order. On another, the lack of causality in the epistemology of sciences impedes mankind to evaluate correctly the negative effects on environment or adopting all-encompassing models to struggle against “climate change” (Bulkeley, 2013; Korstanje, 2018). In this grim and apocalyptic scenario, we adopt creativity and innovation not to disappear.
If Urry was right, creativity is not part of the solution, but the problem. The same can be said about technology. In this section, we shall discuss critically the role of creativity and technology in the contexts of the postmodern city. Richard Florida in a seminal text, The Creative Class, talks of the emergence of a post-industrial class in the urban cities which adopted creativity as its tug of war. This class not only makes more open minds but also works for a multicultural world (Florida, 2004). In this vein, Florida continues the discussion left by T. Veblen about the leisure class. Florida toys with the idea that liberal education and ideals paved the ways for the rise of innovative entrepreneurs who comprises professionals, intellectuals and various types of artists who push for further economic shifts in the major US cities. This surfacing class, for him, evokes the needs of changing the traditional workplaces towards the horizons of a global economy. Cities should be benefited by the arrival of the creative class, but for this to happen, the hosting city must have the three T’s: talent (emulated by the skills and gained knowledge in the population), tolerance (which respects the difference and the ethnic diversity), and technology (which signals to the necessary background to develop an entrepreneur culture) (Florida, 2006). In tourism fields, one of the authoritative voices in creative tourism is Greg Richards. To wit, he developed different interesting and well-integrating theoretical works where the concept not only was interrogated, but he coins the term “the paradox of creativity”. The concept denotes that while creativity generates positive effects in local communities, narrowing hosts and guests and employing the amassed wealth to better the community; not surprisingly in the passing of years, this flexible and decentralized version of cultural tourism will inevitably derive in standardized and saturated forms of (alienated) consumption (Richards and Raymond, 2000; Richard and Wilson, 2007; Richards, 2011a, 2011b).
To some extent, creativity helps overcoming those obstacles that prevent the progress and well-functioning of tourism (Borrelli and Kalalyil, 2011; Rogerson, 2013). The expertise of policymakers, adjoined to the synergic cooperation of all stakeholders, results in an accurate diagnosis that employs culture as an instrument of salvation, eradicating the negative effects of unsustainable tourism (Chang, Backman and Chih Huang, 2014; de Bruin and Jelincic, 2016). Those researchers interested in creativity tailored the theory to a particular case study, most of them documented in an underdeveloped economy or a saturated destination (Friedmann, 2018). In this way, creative tourism was amply accepted and adopted by many scholars in the fields of cultural tourism – above all in tourism management and marketing – in order to make destinations more resilient though no attention was given to Richard’s paradox (Hall and Page, 2009; Tan, Luh and Kung, 2014; Saxena, 2016; Brouder, 2012).
As with the previous argument, Korstanje et al. (2016) unearths the original worries of Urry, which remained unheard by his adherents, dangling the possibilities that creativity and particularly creative tourism would be signs of exhaustion in a hyper-globalized economy that today is confronted with the sustainability of the planet. This begs some more pungent points which were not addressed by Richards – is creativity and technology the affirmation of the end of tourism as Urry initially lamented, or simply an efficient mechanism towards a better society?
As reviewed in the earlier sections, the same technology that accelerated the growth of tourism worldwide seems to be now recreating new forms of consumption that escape to the traditional mode of movements or travelling. Following Urry, this marks the end of tourism – at least as we know it.
In 1995 Urry coined the phrase “the end of tourism” to refer a rapid disorganization of capitalism, where the habits of leisure are changing. Lay-citizens do not need travelling for touring while the division of leisure and work is certainly blurred. In a seminal chapter incorporated in the book Tourism and Mobilities: local-global connections, Tim Gale (2008) interrogates on Urry’s argument considering the virtualization of tourism as a simulated experience, which combines production with consumption at the same time. The proliferation of countless risks such as terrorism adjoined to the fact that destinations are gradually saturated leads toward the virtualization (end) of tourism as we know today. The technology is employed to reach destinations that otherwise would be inexpugnable. This inevitably dispossesses tourism from its original function and purpose. From its inception, as Gale observes, tourism is doomed to its final destruction. One thing is clear. The capitalist economy expanded to other non-western markets in the recent decades. This generated an inter-link with developed and underdeveloped nations as never before. Any change or crisis in some local economy has impacts in the rest of the system affecting many other economies. This process of globalization, which was originally supported by the technological advances in the fields of mobilities (as Urry puts it) decelerated after the stock market crisis happened in 2008. It is not surprising that the financial crisis, as well as the rise of new risks as terrorism that mainly targets main tourist destinations and European cities, helped in the development of virtual tourism as the safest way of touring, the specialized literature agrees (Smeral, 2010; Papatheodorou, Rosselló and Xiao, 2010).
As the previous argument provides, tourism mutated towards new morbid forms, which were already enumerated as Dark Tourism, Mourning Tourism, Post Disaster Tourism and so forth. Capitalism is not correcting the glitches, or the asymmetries that lead towards the problems but commoditizing the aftermaths as a form of entertainment. This ranges from global warming to poverty. Visitors are in quest of new sensations and experiences to affirm their own ego. These new segments of tourists reveal two important assumptions. At a first glimpse, social maladies as poverty, war or mass death were not eradicated. The system failed to perform a fairer distribution of wealth, in which case many citizens – in the underdeveloped economies – were forced to live in miserable conditions. What is more important, these undeveloped economies appeal to foster tourism as a form of poverty relief. Slum tourism, to set an example, shows the resilient capacity of slum-dwellers, as well as the role of tourism, to overcome their living conditions. However, since poverty is the main commodity to exchange, as F. Medeiros puts it, it is very hard to think that slum tourism generates social upward mobility. Slum-dwellers are exploited and commoditized in order to be gazed by foreign tourists, though they take certain advantages from the commercial exchange (Freire Medeiros, 2014). This exactly denotes a paradox revolving these types of demands. Secondly, there is a new tendency oriented to gaze “the Other’s pain” to affirm the own status and mainstream cultural values. Those tourists, who visit spaces of destruction or mass death, need not only confirm their own status, but renovate the liaison to their respective states. The problem is that since the real causes of disaster remain, the possibilities the same disaster happens again are high (Korstanje, 2016). Doubtless, the classic patterns of consumption in holidays which consisted in visiting exotic beaches and sunbathing set the pace to new (morbid) expressions. This seems to be the peak of the iceberg, and not as Urry said, the end of tourism. To some extent, Urry was correct in deciphering the evolution of an aesthetic reflexibility as a force that obscures the causality between the event and its causes. In the aesthetic reflexibility there is no causality and one event is replaced by a new one. As a result of this, people are receiving more information but they have problems understanding it. He brilliantly realized how not only even disasters or risks would be commoditized as spectacles, but the capitalist system would turn towards more depersonalized forms of relationships and lifestyles. The rapid and inevitable exhaustion of resources, adjoined to the climate crisis, moves the economy towards the imposition of sign as the main regulator in the commodity-exchange. Far from being good, as Urry alerts, the figure behind the economies of sign reminds the impossibilities of capitalism to grant a sustainable planet. Though Urry is correct in his diagnosis, most probably he put the cart before the horse when he refers to “the end of tourism”. As a rite of passage, tourism recycles and takes different shapes depending on the cultural background. The cultural values of society are expressed through tourism. As Krippendorf (2010) observed, tourism – like technology – is not bad or good; it revitalizes the day-to-day frustrations to achieve social cohesion. In consequence, though the end of tourism would be a utopia, it remains interesting to discuss its epistemological changes in the years to come. What will be the role of creativity and technology in this process?
Although Urry never gave a clear diagnosis to respond to this question with accuracy, he dangles that creativity is the direct result of the chaotic (decentralized) form of production, which resulted once the aesthetic reflexibility arrived. We are more creative (or smarter) once our natural resources are being depleted. In competence with others, we need to optimize the time and efforts to achieve the goal. This does not mean that creativity and technology is leading to the climate crisis, but just the opposite. When the cultural values of capitalism (as interests and profits) are not limited, we exhaust our resources and need to appeal to creativity to survive. This metaphor bodes well in what American sociologist Richard Sennett dubbed as “the corrosion of character”. He acknowledged that a new decentralized capitalism is shaping not only labour relations but the nature of labour itself. In today’s capitalism people are offered to accept more flexible working rules such as fewer working hours, flexible or home-working and so forth, but beyond these changes, the workers are systematically exploited by the capital-owners. At the same time, workers are pressed to manage their own potentialities and skills to deal with external risks. The state is not the protector of workforce nor the regulator of working relations anymore. At the bottom, we are going through an international labour crisis as one of the greatest current security threats for business. While the workers competition increases, workers are unable to interrogate the ruling elite. Sennett is rightly asserting that innovation should be seen as a disruptive force that recreates the autonomy of the agency ensuring more benefits, knowledge and freedom, which is used to compete with others while the rules of the game are never altered. This does not mean that creativity is in fact an ideological instrument of control but unless the values of this solipsist culture are placed upside down, the figure of creativity is the immediate consequence (not the cure) of a depersonalized rationale (Sennett, 1998). Last but not least, Korstanje coined the term “Thana Capitalism” to denote a new facet of capitalism where the morbid drive for gazing the Others’ suffering and social Darwinism ideologically prevailed (Korstanje, 2016).
Ensuring the long-term sustainable development of destinations is one of the key roles of Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs). To ensure this, DMOs adopt offline (brochures, trade shows, market research, product development, etc.) and online (presence on social media platforms, e-marketing and mobile marketing, etc.) strategies (Gowreesunkar, Séraphin and Morrison, 2018).
Starting with online strategies, research provides evidence that social media marketing helps to engage with consumers; enhances customer equity (Kim and Ko, 2012); offers additional promotion opportunities (Stankov, Lazic and Dragicevic, 2010); helps to popularise brands (De Vries, Gensler and Leeflang, 2012); and provides organisations an opportunity to collect data on customers’ feedback. As for Visual Online Learning Material (VOLM), they can contribute to educating visitors particularly in the case of destinations with negative images (Seraphin, Butcher and Korstanje, 2016). Offline strategies used to promote and communicate the narrative of destinations and tourism organizations rely very often on the design of logos (Gali, Camprubi and Donaire, 2016). Online and offline strategies are used to promote destinations’ built, natural and cultural heritage (Brown and Cave, 2010; Cisneros-Martinez and Fernandez-Morales, 2015). Heritage is often used in destinations’ branding strategies (Seraphin et al., 2018). Online and offline strategies are also used to promote events (Hartman and Zandberg, 2015).
The listed marketing strategies are considered as explicit and sometimes aggressive marketing strategies. “Explicit and aggressive marketing strategies have proven to be ineffective” (Alvarez and Campo, 2014; Seddighi, Nuttall and Theocharous, 2001 cited in Seraphin, Butcher and Korstanje, 2016: 2). Equally important, subtle strategies have proven to be more effective (Seraphin, Butcher and Korstanje, 2016).
In this chapter, we are therefore suggesting a subtle management approach of the image of destinations, based on the ambidextrous management of tourism organizations that can have a significant impact on the overall tourism industry of a destination. This leads to the need to develop business models.
The purpose of business models is to inform the tourism sector on ways the industry is operating and how to innovate and change current business practices for the benefit of the industry by addressing existing challenges (Reinhold, Zach and Krizaj, 2017). A more formal definition was also provided by Zott and Amit (2010 cited in Reinhold, Zach and Krizaj, 2017:463): “A business model is an interdependent system of activities that explains how an individual or collective actor creates and captures value”. Finally, a business model is also about co-creation, accommodating new business practices and changing consumer behaviour (Reinhold, Zach and Krizaj, 2017).
Reinhold, Zach and Krizaj (2017) also explained that to develop a model, three elements are important: (a) Focusing on the interdependent system of activities; in other words, identifying the actors involved in the system, the links between them, how they engage with one another, the objective they are pursuing, and the value created by (b) including individual and collective actors. They key focus is on how the different actors can develop their business model by means of conceptual transfer and analogical reasoning (c) creating and capturing value. This is the core of business model research which focuses on the benefits for all parties involved. The challenge for the 21st century is therefore to develop the most suitable model for the tourism industry.
Innovation can save the tourism industry. Indeed, innovation is all about introducing new concepts that would meet the needs of existing and new customers. Innovation is presented as a beneficial strategy for organizations as it contributes to stimulate increased spending and growth but requires a capacity of adaptation. Changes linked to innovations are either incremental or radical. Radical innovation is all about introducing new ideas that disrupt existing practices. Radical innovations “prefer to focus on why customers make certain purchases and, equally important, why non-customers do not” (Brooker and Joppe, 2014:502). Innovation can be achieved through ambidextrous management or organizational ambidexterity.
Ambidexterity calls for a balance between exploration and exploitation. Indeed, organizations deeply anchored onto exploration suffer the costs of experimentation (R&D) with, sometimes, limited benefits. Organizations anchored onto exploitation, on the other hand, do not move forward and remain in a “status-quo” in terms of performance. Organizations who manage to find a balance between exploitation and exploration are likely to be prosperous (Nieto-Rodriguez, 2014 [Online]). The same can be said about mastering a balance between adaptability (in other words the ability of the organization to innovate to adapt changes in the market) and alignment (daily management of operations). This approach is about balancing exploitation of existing resources and competencies with a focus on the present, and exploring new opportunities with a focus on the future (Mihalache and Mihalache, 2016). Despite the challenges of achieving ambidexterity because exploitation and exploration innovation are contradictory activities, Mihalache and Mihalache (2016:144), taking the example of the tourism industry (main service industry), explain that “organisational ambidexterity is a key driver of sustained performance in the tourism industry, since it enables firms to make the most of their current capabilities while at the same time developing new ones to attract new customers”.
Future research should look at developing suitable and innovative models for the 21st century hospitality and tourism industry using the Reinhold, Zach and Krizaj (2017) model.
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