THE TOURIST DISTRICT MODEL OF COMPETITIVENESS FOR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN LOCAL TERRITORIAL

Tourism has represented one of the major sources of balance of trade earnings for many years in the most developed countries. According to estimates by the World Tourism Organization (WTO), world tourism flows will grow by 4-5% annually over the coming years, reaching in 2020 an estimated number of 1.6 billion international arrivals, of which 378 million will be short haul international travellers. With the passage of time demand will become more diversified and this will lead to the spread of “new tourism”, the search for new products and increasingly diverse offers, characterized by organized local tourist systems. This paper underlines the importance of the tourist district model as a strategic tool for creating innovative processes of endogenous development in a highly globalized framework, moreover it tries to highlight the peculiarities of tourist districts and their importance in overcoming the major limitations of the distribution chain. Therefore, the birth of the tourism district represents an important opportunity for the promotion of tourism development of different local realities.