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1. Introduction
The past 50 years have seen a growing interest in tourism network and other research methodologies by the academic world. Having developed into the most predominant sector in world’s economy, tourism could not have been ignored by the community of researchers. Explaining the phenomenon of tourism, its effects, its influence and relationships with other sectors of human activity and attempts at forecasting future developments and behaviors have increased in importance with significant numbers of people involved in such research.
The position of researchers in the tourism field is at times difficult. Practitioners of other disciplines charge them with being too soft, too application oriented and of not having been able (yet) to build up a rational and uniform theoretical framework (Hall and Butler, 1995; Baggio and Baggio, 2020). On the other hand, people involved in day by day operational activities accuse them of flying too high and wasting time in fooling around with models and conjectures without producing much of practical use in helping with the problems they face. As a very recent field of investigation, tourism is still trying to find a reasonable compromise between these two extremes (Leiper, 2000; Farrell and Twining–Ward, 2004; Tribe, 2005, p. 119).
The boundaries of the tourism and travel industry are indefinite (Cohen, 1984; Cooper et al., 2005; McIntosh and Goeldner, 1990). Tourism brings together segments from a number of different activities with a wide variety of products and services exhibiting little homogeneity and with different technologies used in the production process. It may be questioned whether it should even be classified as an industry by itself in the traditional sense of manufacturing or trade (Mill and Morrison, 1992; Leiper, 2000; Morrison et al., 2004). Moreover, reflecting changes in wider society, in the past few years tourism has become an extremely dynamic system. Introduction of flexible organizational structures, fast changing customer behavior and strong impacts from the development of transportation technologies have exerted a formidable pressure on the whole sector (Valeri, 2020).
Many researchers have contributed and are contributing to the growth of knowledge in the tourism domain. They are bringing into the field their multiform and diverse experiences and backgrounds. Geographers, sociologists, economists, mathematicians, ecologists and historians, are all giving their interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary...