Making cultural tourism networks work - the role of collective actors

Culture and tourism have a complementary and mutually beneficial relationship: value offerings are co-created by integrated value chains and networks of interdependent actors. However, building and maintaining cultural tourism networks is far from straightforward: both the tourism industry and the cultural sector are fragmented and heterogeneous, and often seem to be speaking different languages. We investigate how collective actors can contribute to fostering collaborative strategies, focusing on a specific inter-organizational network located in the city of Venice. Our main findings have implications both for managerial and public policies: the identification of actors, positioned at intermediate network levels, who can influence a network?s functioning allows for interventions not generally addressed to the destination as a whole but aimed at solving specific network?s weaknesses.