Tourism Local Systems as a Strategic Tool to Develop Tourism Destinations: The Case of Campania

The tourism sector has grown almost continuously in recent decades, showing strong resilience even during economic slumps or in the presence of political and health crises. Yet the current state of uncertainty in the tourism sector due to the coronavirus pandemic situation has caused an unprecedented crisis in the tourism sector. This work is based on the assumption that the necessary condition for the recovery of tourism is deepening the role of local communities in planning, managing and encouraging tourist activity. The first part proposes an analysis of Tourism Local Systems (TLS), where the criterion of considering tourism as an integrated system of activities represents a valid tool to support tourism. Consistent with this idea, the article proposes a statistical methodology of territorial aggregation, namely the TLS, which may be viewed not only as a tool for destination management but also as a mean to promote the development of tourism destinations.The analysis focuses on the case of the Campania Region and starts from the creation of a tourist index for each municipality of the Region that allows us to make a ranking of municipalities based on their tourist potential. Finally, applying a cluster methodology, it is possible to aggregate around municipalities having a high tourist potential (drivers), groups of municipalities that we can consider a homogeneous system in terms of tourist offer. The analysis shows that many municipalities in Campania with a high tourist potential exhibit high deficiencies in terms of infrastructure, while municipalities with a low tourist potential have a lot of cultural and natural attractions poorly valued. Thinking in terms of local systems makes it possible to increase the quality of the tourist offer and therefore to mitigate these shortcomings. Our results provide interesting insights into the characteristics of Tourism Local Systems obtained from our cluster analysis. In conclusion, it can be said that the TLS leads to a change of perspective: the territory is not seen as a simple space where tourism takes place but becomes the engine of the tourist system