Attractivité touristique réelle et potentielle d’une île méditerranéenne : une enquête en Sicile, basée sur la perception des parties prenantes

The attractiveness of regions for firms, investments, tourists, students, workers, talented people, and other categories is a relevant issue for regional economic development in the age of globalization. Attractiveness for tourists is one of the most important dimensions as the economic relevance of tourism is continually on the rise. This is true for peripheral areas like islands, where attracting people and investments is even more difficult due to the geographical characteristics. This paper presents the case study of tourist attractiveness of Sicily, the largest island in the Mediterranean, based on the qualitative findings of a research on the stakeholders? perception and point of view conducted through in-depth semi-structured interviews. Qualitative analyses of the text of the interviews are twofold : on the one hand we have conducted a thematic analysis, identifying, and analyzing themes and sub-themes which capture something important in relation to the overall research question. On the other hand, we analyzed document content as a lexical tool using Leximancer software, which analyzes meanings within texts by extracting key concepts and ideas. These analyses have been able to the bring out the key aspects and the key drivers that so far did not emerge clearly from the studies on Sicilian tourism. The tourist attractiveness of Sicily, for better or worse, cannot be disentangled from its physical nature and its unique and rich history. Thanks to its island status, and thanks to its valuable assets in terms of landscape, climate, art, and culture, it has a great potential in terms of tourist attractiveness. However, it suffers also the disadvantages associated with being an island : like the low level of accessibility and the high seasonality. Moreover, the tourist industry is poorly organized and not competitive compared to other Mediterranean islands, and the governance of the tourist sector is deficient. At the end, in an extremely peripheral region like Sicily where private entrepreneurs suffer from absolute competitive disadvantages, the role of the public institutions is fundamental in order to exploit successfully its local and unique assets, and to increase the level of attractiveness.