Uncertain Position and Significance of Destination Management Organisations in the Entire Network of Destination Stakeholders – the Case of Croatia

Within numerous definition determinants, a tourism destination still predominantly represents a complex and dynamic system of numerous stakeholders related at a formal and non-formal level. Lately, there has been an increasing prevailing opinion that to understand such a system, and, owing to it, its efficient management and organisation, the most adequate is the network approach. In other words, it is necessary to do social network analytics with the purpose to gain insight into organisational capacities of social networks aimed at enhancing tourism destination management. This paper shows the analysis of social networks on the sample of two tourism destinations – littoral and continental. Within the analysis it was especially important to determine the role and efficiency of Croatian Destination Management Organisations (DMO) in destination management by testing the topological potentials of their current institutional position within the formal and non-formal relations with other stakeholders of the community (network). For that purpose, the analytical tool of mathematical social network graph was used in which stakeholders were shown as vertices and their relationships as edges of the same graph. Measurements were conducted on the global (group) level within the indicators of centrality, density, cohesion, modularity and clustering of observed networks. The main emphasis was placed on comparative analysis between the variant in which the DMO participates in the destination networks, which reflects the existing condition and the variant in which the DMO is exempt by simulation as a stakeholder in those networks. This tested the resistance of destination networks on the given changes in their topological structure. In the new structure changed by simulation without DMO, the results did not show a generally more significant disorders in the topological network structures and group characteristics (measures) in relation to the previous variant. The exemption somewhat happened within formal networks in the littoral destination. In general, the exemption itself of the DMO, at least with the existing institutional determination and mission, would not cause significant disorders in the destination management processes. In a certain sense it is realistic to expect that there would be a decentralisation and creating space for innovations, diversification and enhancement of the destination experience.