The Role of Partnerships in Staging Tourism Experiences: Evidence from a Festival

Most of the studies conducted so far have tackled how individual companies and organizations can try to stage memorable experiences, almost neglecting how destinations or even aggregations of destinations can themselves stage memorable experiences. More specifically, extant literature has overlooked the role of partnerships between destination management organizations (DMOs) in developing novel tourism products able to trigger compelling tourist experiences. Building on the Pink Night festival case, this chapter bridges this gap, as we show that partnerships involving different local DMOs can be crucial in order to stage events taking place in a wide geographic area including different administrativeunits and empower the absorptive capability of the tourist experience. Last but not least, we innovatively recognize how partnerships between DMOs conjointly staging a tourist experience through an event could modify the comprehensive image held by tourists of the wider tourist area involved in the event itself, thus contributing to rebrand the individual destinations themselves. Unlike the ethnographic study carried out by Giovanardi et al. (2014) on the Pink Night festival, this study sheds light on the importance of the DMOs and their cooperation in order to develop a complex creative tourism product. In order to achieve the aforementioned objective, the chapter is structured as follows. In section 2, we present our twofold theoretical framework drawing on (a) the experience economy framework applied to tourism and (b) the role of destination partnerships. In section 3 we describe the empirical setting and introduce the case of the Pink Night festival. In section 4, we illustrate and discuss our research findings. In section 5 we provide our conclusions and implications, describe the limitations of the analysis and outline a research agenda related to the role of partnerships among DMOs in staging memorable tourist experiences.