Reframing mountain destinations from the perspective of tourist mobility: hub-and-spoke travel patterns

In mountain areas, tourism destination management and branding generally follow administrative boundaries, representing a loss of competitiveness in the tourism sector for theses already remote destinations, in many cases, with under-developed tourism. Increasingly, researchers are claiming to consider tourist perspectives, not only in drawing up promotion strategies, but in rethinking management structures of tourism destinations, which are traditionally based on administrative boundaries. This can help to promote and manage mountain destinations more efficiently and provide an opportunity to economically develop these areas in decline through tourism. This research aims to detect new destination areas based on how tourists geographically consume mountain destinations in two European medium mountain ranges. To do so, the territoriality of tourist flows from accommodation hubs to surrounding attractions are analysed, representing hub-and spoke travel patterns. This enabled the detection of latent consumer-based mountain destinations, which were then contrasted with the official destinations limits in order to identify lost opportunities linked to mismatching between how mountain destinations are consumed and how they are managed. The findings show that consumer-based destinations are nothing like officially managed destinations and identify the most relevant factors determining hub-consumption systems. Finally, this research contributes to the discussion on increasing competitiveness of mountain destinations by adapting tourism branding and destination management to tourists.