Creativity and innovation – Sources of competitive advantage in the value chain of tourism enterprises

As the highly standardized mass tourism demonstrated its incapacity to satisfy the increasingly complex needs of tourists, the necessity to develop a new approach for the production, selling and promotion of tourism products became obvious. In the current economic environment, the competitiveness of tourism operators is significantly dependent on their capacity to transform service provision into a creative process of satisfying consumers’ individual needs. Affirming creativity as an important source of competitive advantage in the tourism industry has actually led to the emergence of a new type of tourism – creative tourism – a type of tourism which suggests new products and services, new collaboration and partnership structures, new forms of organization and particularly new experiences for tourism consumers. The economic impact of creativity and innovation in tourism is significant: by integrating creativity in the various production, selling and promotion activities, an operator may influence a tourism product’s added value as well as the satisfaction that this product brings to the final consumer. With the aim of determining valid instruments to maximize the value of the tourism product, the authors conducted a qualitative research on the intensity of creativity and innovation on various levels in the value chain of cultural and balneotherapy tourism in Romania. The purpose is to study the influence and perspectives for generating and integrating creativity in the activities which build the complex process of developing tourism products.