Roles and opinions of primary and secondary stakeholders within community-type destinations

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify primary and secondary stakeholders for the development of community-type destinations and to analyse how the difference in power characterizes them with regards to how they value specific rules and how they estimate trust and control in the destinations. From this analysis it is possible to draw useful indicators for the definition of the destination governance. Design/methodology/approach – The paper takes the form of a literature review and field research. The literature review considers network approach and stakeholder approach in order to analyse the actors involved in the tourist offer (size of the network and characteristics of the nodes) and their influence reputation for identifying primary and secondary stakeholders within the destination. The field research is carried out in two community-type destinations in the Alps. In both destinations, tourism is the main economic activity, as it involves a multiplicity of public and private stakeholders; the two destinations do differ for some important factors, like the kind of DMOs and the path of tourism development. Findings – The research identifies and investigates primary and secondary stakeholders within community-type destinations and their opinions about the involvement of public and private actors for the development of the destinations and their judgements regarding trust and control. Research limitations/implications – Results are limited to two community-type destinations. Originality/value – The research adopts an innovative methodology to identify primary and secondary stakeholder of community-type destinations and highlights some indicators for the definition of the destination governance (e.g. level of community participations, role of private and public actors, influence of trust and control). Keywords Networking, Trust, Stakeholder analysis Tourism development Paper type Research paper