Creative tourism destination competitiveness: an integrative model and agenda for future research

Depósito de investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla https://idus.us.es/ “This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Creative Industries Journal on 2023, available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/17510694.2021.1980672.” 1 Creative Tourism Destination Competitiveness: An Integrative Model and Agenda for Future Research Álvaro Dias*, Universidade Lusófona, Tourism Department, Campo Grande, 376, 1749-024 Lisbon, Portugal and Universidad de Sevilla, Facultad Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, Sevilla, Spain; alv[email protected]. ORCID: 0000-0003-4074-1586 Maria Rosario González-Rodríguez, Universidad de Sevilla, Departamento Economía Aplicada I, Facultad Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, Sevilla, Spain; rosagle[email protected]. ORCID: 0000-0002-6484-4128 Mafalda Patuleia, Universidade Lusófona, Tourism Department, Campo Grande, 376, 1749-024 Lisbon, Portugal;. [email protected]. ORCID: 0000-0002-8401-1860 * Corresponding author. Abstract Creative tourism has been approached from several points of view: products and processes, enabling elements, marketing, sustainability, etc. However, to our best knowledge, there is no integrative model that brings together all its dimensions and enables the 'birds’ eye' perspective of the creative destination competitiveness. As such, this article aims to present a model of competitiveness of a creative tourism destination. The model presents four essential dimensions: core elements (products and processes, travelers and entrepreneurs), enablers (community engagement and stakeholders competences), creative atmosphere as the binding element, and developers (marketing and communication). Avenues for future research are presented based on the identification of areas to expand existing knowledge on creative tourism research, mainly by proposing measurement instruments which may contribute to operationalize the proposed model. Creative tourism; Destination Competitiveness; Creative Entrepreneur; Creative Atmosphere; Destination Management 2 Creative Tourism Destination Competitiveness: An Integrative Model and Agenda for Future Research Abstract Creative tourism has been approached from several points of view: products and processes, enabling elements, marketing, sustainability, etc. However, to our best knowledge, there is no integrative model that brings together all its dimensions and enables the 'birds’ eye' perspective of the creative destination competitiveness. As such, this article aims to present a model of competitiveness of a creative tourism destination. The model presents four essential dimensions: core elements (products and processes, travelers and entrepreneurs), enablers (community engagement and stakeholders competences), creative atmosphere as the binding element, and developers (marketing and communication). Avenues for future research are presented based on the identification of areas to expand existing knowledge on creative tourism research, mainly by proposing measurement instruments which may contribute to operationalize the proposed model. Keywords Creative tourism; Destination Competitiveness; Creative Entrepreneur; Creative Atmosphere; Destination Management 1. INTRODUCTION This research has as its central theme the competitiveness of a creative tourist destination. The theme of creative tourism has been the subject of intense research over the past two decades (e.g. Bruin and Jelinc, 2016; Richards and Wilson, 2006). The discussion involves various topics such as creative tourists (Ali, Ryu, and Hussain, 2016; Tan, Kung, and Luh, 2012; Tan, Tan, and Luh, 2015), the atmosphere (Maitland, 2010; Santagata and Bertacchini, 2011), creative entrepreneurs (Komppula, 2014; Mottiar, 2007; Richards, 2011), destination marketing (Dias-sardinha, Ross, and Gomes, 2018), the role of public entities (Clare, 2012) or the creative product itself (Binkhorst and Den Dekker, 2009; Drake, 2003). We argue that all these factors are essential for a given place to become a creative tourism destination. In this vein, consolidating each factor is essential to strengthen the competitiveness of the creative tourist destination. It's a snowball effect where better (not necessarily more) 3 creative tourists will attract more creative entrepreneurs and vice versa. Furthermore, the inherent encounters add experiential value for tourists and increase the creation of knowledge about users (Sørensen and Jensen, 2015). At the same time, given the specificity of tourists and entrepreneurs, the destination must be properly promoted and developed around a vibrant atmosphere. The subject of tourism destination competitiveness has been widely discussed at the academic (Abreu-novais, Ruhanen, and Arcodia, 2016; Haugland, 2011; Hong, 2016) and practitioner levels (e.g. World Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Index). However, in the research on creative tourism destinations, the concept of competitiveness is scarcely included in either the titles or keywords of articles. Simultaneously, research on creative tourism is fragmented lacking the interconnection between the different perspectives. As such, the study of the competitiveness of a creative tourist destination requires an approach with an integrative model. Creative tourists are attracted to certain destinations because there are experiences in which they can participate and co-create, within an atmosphere that enhances a production-led cultural context (Richards and Wilson, 2007). The existence of creative tourists makes the destination also attractive for entrepreneurs. It is a virtuous cycle. However, in the context of creative tourism, the continued growth of this cycle is not necessarily a positive thing. Destination and creative entrepreneurs are not suited to receive masses of tourists, who would cause a loss of competitive differentiation and would dilute the very concept of lifestyle entrepreneurship (Marchant and Mottiar, 2011; Mottiar, 2007) in something unnatural and less experiential. This means that DMO must take into consideration specific strategies for the promotion of a creative destination, seeking to achieve a balance between the number of tourists who allow, on the one hand, the sustainability of creative businesses and entrepreneurs, many of them integrated in small businesses or even working on their own (Ateljevic and Doorne, 2000). On the other hand, the marketing activities must take into consideration the sensitivity to avoid the massification of the destination (Maitland, 2010). Eventually DMO must combine their strategies with self-marketing made by lifestyle entrepreneurs (Eikhof and Haunschild, 2006). The negative effect of excess tourism is also a very sensitive issue for the communities in which creative tourist destinations operate. The role of the community is essential, and the existence of consensus in the community regarding the projects for the creation or development of creative tourism is essential for its success (Dias-sardinha et al., 2018; Dias et al., 2018). Within this framework, the proposal of an integrative model of creative tourism requires the articulation of several actors, specifically: the tourists, the entrepreneurs, the atmosphere, the DMO and the community. As such, the main objectives for this article are: (i) to identify the Comentado [WU1]: Do you mean overtourism? 4 competitiveness factors of a creative tourism destination; (ii) to establish an integrative model for the competitiveness of a creative tourism destination. This article expands existing knowledge about creative tourism by integrating into a single model the diverse dimensions contributing to a more attractive and sustainable creative destination. It also introduces the topic of destination competitiveness in the context of creative tourism, establishing a framework for future research in this field, and supporting decision-making in destination management and policy making. 2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK Creative tourism has been developing rapidly since the 2000s. It reflects the growing desire of tourists to enhance their own creative potential but also the need for entrepreneurs, cities and creative regions to profile themselves in an increasingly competitive global market (Richards and Wilson, 2007). Furthermore, creative tourism has become a source of differentiation as cultural heritage was transformed into commoditized experience modules (Binkhorst and Den Dekker, 2009). Culture turned into a mass consumption phenomenon in many destinations, and creativity occupied a central role in the transformation of traditional cultural tourism into creative tourism (P. Remoaldo and Cadima-Ribeiro, 2019), specially by creating new tourism products that enhance the destination experience (Ross, Saxena, Correia, and Deutz, 2017b). Furthermore, the idealization of the product also changed. The modification implied an shift from discrete products with clearly marked boundaries to more diffused ones (Lampel and Germain, 2016) enhancing the role of the tourist co-creation (Sørensen and Jensen, 2015). However, destinations must address several challenges, by trying to embrace creative tourism as a strategy to overcome the congestion and trivialization of tourism experiences brought by cultural tourism massification model (Paula Remoaldo, 2019), in a context where space is a cultural production-led (Richards and Wilson, 2006). The first challenge is attracting creative entrepreneurs or developers. Culture has become an important form to promote the destination uniqueness (Binkhorst and Den Dekker, 2009). Creative tourism is related to a shared learning-by-doing experience embracing a range of experiential learning activities (De Bruin and Jelincic, 2016). Furthermore, this interactive engagement creative tourism (Dias-sardinha et al., 2018) involves the promotion of local culture and authentic experiences (P. Remoaldo and Cadima-Ribeiro, 2019) “only attainable if the ‘lecturers’ in charge of conducting the creative activities are local people and are able to perform creative activities imbedded in the local/regional culture and heritage” (p. 87). The authenticity of the experiences is associated in the literature with daily life (Maitland, 2010) blurring the boundaries between producers and consumers (Lampel and Germain, 2016). In summary the Comentado [WU2]: You need a discussion of competitiveness frameworks as asll. 5 inherent challenge is how to promote equilibrium between the attraction factors of creative entrepreneurs or developers to a specific place (e.g. way of life, money, local development) and the offering of experiences with the before-mentioned characteristics. On this context, the first research question results as follows: what are the creative developers’ attraction factors to a specific location? The second challenge is related to a binding factor: the creative atmosphere. Creative entrepreneurs contribute to a creative, vibrant atmosphere (Richards and Wilson, 2006) a core argument in the appeal of a specific location life (Maitland, 2010) to attract more mainstream tourists (Richards, 2011). Furthermore, creative atmosphere represents the network structure of local systems of cultural production (Maitland, 2010), a key ingredient for tourism destination competitiveness. However, defining the creative atmosphere of a place may be difficult and not be very helpful in attracting visitors and entrepreneurs to the location (Richards, 2011). Marketing a creative destination is the third challenge. Despite the recognition of the importance of creative tourism, several territories fail to position themselves in the industry (P. Remoaldo and Cadima-Ribeiro, 2019). Developing place marketing strategies based on themes and narratives (Richards and Wilson, 2006) where tourists and entrepreneurs participate in cocreating the tourism experience (Dias-sardinha et al., 2018) is a difficult task. From the moment areas are advertised as undiscovered they are likely to attract many visitors and loose much of their interest for certain visitors (Maitland, 2010). Furthermore, creative entrepreneurs, deeply involved with what they do that blurs the boundary between work and leisure (Richards and Wilson, 2006), are generally not interested in masses of tourists. This also poses a challenge for tourism marketers and destination marketing office (DMO) who must find new and subtler ways to attract potential visitors attention of these places (Maitland, 2010). The fourth challenge is the acceptance of creative tourism projects and initiatives by the community and other stakeholders. In many cases, the development of creative project is dependent of the involvement of other entities, usually external to the community (government, banks, ONG’s) (Dias, Patuleia, and Dutschke, 2018). 2.1. The Core Components Figure 1 presents the actors designated as core components. These various dimensions are developed in the following sections. Within the presented growing development of creative tourism, the theme has been the subject of extensive academic research, with the concept now being more blurred (Ross et al., 2017b). On this vein, creative tourism is recognized not as a coherent ‘niche’, but instead a series of creative practices linking production, consumption and place (De Bruin and Jelincic, 2016; Stamboulis and Skayannis, 2003). Creativity in the context 6 of creative tourism embeds the relationship with the cultural and human elements of a particular place (Richards and Wilson, 2007). 2.1.1. The link to place The link to a place plays an important role on entrepreneurial performance (Hallak, Brown, and Lindsay, 2012). Tourism experiences consist on a combination of the local natural or cultural heritage, narratives and stories and the tourist's active participation or co-creation, all associated with the place as a distinctive factor (Anderson, 2012). Creative entrepreneurs benefit from being embedded locally (Bredvold & Skålén, 2016), facilitating the access to local culture by merely living and spending time locally (Valtonen, 2009). The link to place also foster the community involvement (Sofield, Guia, and Specht, 2017), allowing the access to endogenous knowledge (Richards, 2011), which is tacit and difficult to imitate (Hoarau, 2014), thus a source of competitiveness (Bosworth and Farrell, 2011). As such, according to this approach, creative tourism destination competitiveness is based on differentiated experiences supported by the cultural environment of a specific place (Tan et al., 2015). Meaningful places has a high potential for person attachment (Lewicka, 2011), where “creative workers subjective, personal or emotional response to place will affect how they may use the attributes of that place for aesthetic inspiration, and that response will be molded by individual identities, perceptions and beliefs” (Drake, 2003, p. 512). The cultural characteristics of the destination represent the basis for destinations to develop their creative tourism activities (Tan et al., 2015). Moreover, the place identity was found to have positive implications in entrepreneurs’ self-efficacy and on community support (Hallak et al., 2012). On this context, the place appears to be the basis for the development of both product and providers, as well a tourist attraction factor. 2.1.2. The creative tourism product and processes Besides place, creativity is also linked to persons, processes and products (Kahl, Hermes da Fonseca, and Witte, 2009). By emphasizing the importance of the experience, the concept of the product has also changed, as the idea of a product with clearly defined boundaries has become blurred in the context of creative experiences (Lampel and Germain, 2016). On the other hand, the traditional dimensions of destination competitiveness are part of the model where dimensions people friendliness or local hospitality facilities are important for tourists (Zhang and Xie, 2018). Together with things, artifacts, and physical conditions they propitiate a close relationship with individuals in the creativity process and creative experience (Tanggaard, 2012). Vargo and Lusch (2008) referred to these tangible resources as operand. Since factors like vernacular heritage, service quality, and participatory experience are important components of creative tourism experiences (Zhang and Xie, 2018), tourist satisfaction of tourism destination benefit when intangible tourism resources become tangible (Park, Choi, and Lee, 2019). 7 Creative tourism also benefit from operant resources (Vargo and Lusch, 2008) which can be skills, expectations, creative potential and prior knowledge either brought to co-created experiences by tourists and entrepreneurs or providers (Ross, Saxena, Correia, and Deutz, 2017a). Furthermore, by adopting a constructivist approach that emphasizes the tourist participatory process, tourists’ and providers’ experience can transform operand or tangible assets on operant resources (Ross et al., 2017a). The distinction between content and context is one of strategic importance. As stated by Stamboulis and Skayannis (2003) “(e)xperience has always existed in destinations. It was considered however as context rather than content. It was taken for granted - a by-product - rather than innovated (created and developed)” (p. 39). According to the context exposed in this section, creative tourism product is deeply related to the tourist’s learning experience (De Bruin and Jelincic, 2016), implying that there is no separation between tourist and host, tourism spaces and other spaces (Binkhorst and Den Dekker, 2009). The combination of operand and operant factors facilitates the development of more genuine and differentiated experiences associated to the place (Richards, 2011), allowing entrepreneurs aligning their offering to a growing tourist segment searching for place-related experiences (Arias & Cruz, 2018). By incorporating local features, the experiences are unique and constitute the basis of competitiveness of small-scale businesses when compared to large companies’ solutions (Mottiar, 2007). As such, knowledge associated to the place and tourism resources constitute a basis of global competitiveness (Guercini & Ceccarelli, 2020). Figure 1. The core components Creative Travelers Products Processes Creative Developers Place Creative skills Constructivist interpretation strategies Prior knowledge Creative potential Local knowledge Knowledge about the past Operand resources 8 2.1.3. The creative travelers Within the creative tourism field, the research referring to tourists is one of the most representatives, covering several issues. Among the several topics studied some authors proposed a taxonomy of creative tourist (Tan, Luh, and Kung, 2014). Other analyzed the several dimensions contributing to the creative experience such as the active tourist participation (De Bruin and Jelincic, 2016), the interactions with the local context (Tan et al., 2015), or more integrative model of the experiences (Tan et al., 2012). The motivations, intentions and other cognitive processes were also examined. Specifically topics covered the motivations and perceptions of authenticity (Park et al., 2019; Zhang and Xie, 2018), preferences (Ting and Lin, 2015), memories, satisfaction and behavioral intentions (Ali et al., 2016). The creative tourist pertain to a specific niche, characterized by selecting their agenda, their capacity for engagement and interaction with destinations, skilled consumption and search for a narrative (Richards and Wilson, 2006). Tourists became aware that creativity could be used as a way of self-expression (P. Remoaldo and Cadima-Ribeiro, 2019). Furthermore the relationship they develop suggests new patterns of consumption (Lampel and Germain, 2016), where tourists play a central role in the experience networks (Binkhorst and Den Dekker, 2009). As a result the tourist’s learning experience becomes a central characteristic of creative tourist (De Bruin and Jelincic, 2016). With these participatory activities, the term co-creation is inextricably linked to experiences of creative tourism (Ross et al., 2017b). Co-creation exists when firms or providers work in close cooperation with experienced consumers and their intellectual capital (Romero and Molina, 2011). The co-creation concept gained momentum as a result of the service-dominant logic in other research fields (Vargo and Lusch, 2008). In the tourism field the co-creation results from participative experiences allowing the tourist to develop their creative potential by contacting local people (Richards, 2011). The experience co-creation is the key in distinguishing creative tourism from mass cultural tourism (Binkhorst and Den Dekker, 2009). Moreover, cocreation permits the tourist to experience a locals’ lifestyle in a specific creative atmosphere (Richards and Marques, 2012) and act as a marker of authenticity (Maitland, 2010). The impact on destination competitiveness of co-creation activities is determinant. First, because all the players acquire valuable knowledge about the tourist perspective (Sørensen and Jensen, 2015). Second, it allows a spiral of value creation (Lampel and Germain, 2016) increasing innovation and customer satisfaction (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004). 15 The research focused on lifestyle entrepreneurs need a lot more attention (Sun & Xu, 2019; Thomas et al., 2011). Their businesses are run using lifestyle objectives as such, traditional business models cannot be applied (Bosworth & Farrell, 2011; Carlsen, Morrison, & Weber, 2008). Furthermore, they operate in constantly changing environment (García-Rosell, Haanpää and Janhunen, 2019) and they lack the skills and resources to become more competitive (Ioannides and Petersen, 2003). Accordingly, further research on creative destination competitiveness should bring more insights about these entrepreneurs: to learn, in more depth, the profile and competences of the creative entrepreneur and understand the factors promoting the attraction or retention of entrepreneurs in relation to a creative destination. tourism research has made few contributions regarding the way TLEs manage knowledge (Hoarau, 2014). The research on creative entrepreneurs has been predominantly qualitative (e.g. Eikhof and Haunschild, 2006; Komppula, 2004, 2014; Marchant and Mottiar, 2011; Mottiar, 2007). Research addresses several topics such as common characteristics (Marcketti, Niehm, and Fuloria, 2006; Mottiar, 2007), relationship between entrepreneur’s life quality and enterprise growth (Peters, Frehse, and Buhalis, 2009), motivations (Marchant and Mottiar, 2011) or entrepreneurial identity (Bredvold and Skålén, 2016). On this vein, quantitative studies based on surveys can complement these studies. The complementarity benefits from establishing a link to the creative destination competitiveness, by exploring the role of variables like the link to place, networks and community participation, link to the community, capacities and local knowledge absorptive capabilities, as well the way they correlate with entrepreneurs willingness to stay and deviation factors. One difficulty is to obtain a significant sample of these entrepreneurs, because, due to the strong work-lifestyle link, their willingness to respond will be limited. 3.2. Atmosphere Creative entrepreneurs and tourists value the place quality of life as a primary factor in determining the business location (Sun & Xu, 2019). As such, the location decision is based on several criteria not necessarily rational (Arias & Cruz, 2018; Morrison, 2006). Studies focusing on the attraction and retention factors of entrepreneurs and creative tourists do not allow a comprehensive model to be established. Some authors analysed some topics independently. For example, Richards (2011) reports the importance of a ‘stimulating atmosphere’, Hoarau (2014) indicates that a culture of entrepreneurship is important to attract both entrepreneurs and tourists, and Sun and Hu (2019) defend that is necessary a sustainable market supporting creative Comentado [WU6]: ??? 16 businesses. As identified, the atmosphere is the binding element of a creative destination. However, it is difficult to define a creative atmosphere (Richards, 2011). As such, this poses a challenge for further research: to identify the characteristics of a vibrant atmosphere, a core feature of creative destinations (Richards and Wilson, 2007). Tourism literature specifically addressing a place vibrant atmosphere is scarce. Furthermore, although we are experiencing an increasing academic attention on the subject of entrepreneurship in tourism, the role of the link to the place is still underexplored in the TLE context (Kibler, Fink, Lang, & Muñoz, 2015). The key issue is that there are no definitions of a creative atmosphere and no measures to assess the degree of 'attractiveness'. Thus, an important avenue for research is to propose a measure to evaluate a vibrant atmosphere. Similar research followed an exploratory approach based on scale development (Bassi, 2011; Chen and Raab, 2017; Thomas, Quintal, and Phau, 2018; Tsaur, Yen, and Teng, 2018; Wang, Hsieh, Chou, and Lin, 2007) in order to gain “some insights into tourist’s thoughts and experiences” (Tan et al., 2012, p. 160). In this vein, it is suggested scale development to measuring 'creative vibrant atmosphere'. 3.3. DMO Previous research suggests that besides participating in creative experiences, tourists also play a key role on destination marketing activities (P. Remoaldo and Cadima-Ribeiro, 2019; Richards, 2011). This sort of co-marketing activities needs further development in order to understand the complexity of developing the image and identity of a destination (Dias-sardinha et al., 2018). Several actors contribute to this complexity. The tourists generates a growing range of tourist created content (de Souza, Mendes-Filho and Buhalis, 2019; Richards, 2011; Romero and Molina, 2011) which is not controlled by the DMO. Entrepreneurs and creative businesses promotes their activities independently (Eikhof and Haunschild, 2006). The DMO is part of this puzzle. By promoting the destination itself as a key activity but also by conciliating the other actors entrepreneurship (Marchant and Mottiar, 2011; Mottiar, 2007). For the DMO, acting in this context requires specific capabilities and marketing activities which should include new and subtler ways of making potential visitors aware (Maitland, 2010). In this vein, further research could to investigate configurations of DMO marketing capabilities and marketing activities that lead to high performance. To do so, the studies should envisage a qualitative and quantitative approach. It is acknowledged the difficulty of conducting quantitative organizational research, specifically obtaining a reasonable sample. For this reason the use of Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (FsQCA) approach is adequate for small samples. Another advantage of using FsQCA is that “contrary to traditional techniques that treat causal conditions as in-dependent variables, fsQCA offers a logical representation and analysis of causal 17 conditions and exhibits configurations of conditions” (Kallmuenzer, Kraus, Peters, Steiner, and Cheng, 2019, p. 323). The results of this method can be combined with a qualitative approach configured, for example, through focus group sessions with DMO managers. This mixed-method study strategy permits to avoid inconsistent conclusions caused by just focusing on quantitative or qualitative, as recommended by Creswell and Clark (2017). 3.4. Creative Tourists Research related to creative tourists is the most extended and profound among the other destination actors. Several topics have been object of empirical research, such as, the involvement of active tourist participation (De Bruin and Jelincic, 2016), motivations for participating in creative activities and perceptions of authenticity (Zhang and Xie, 2018), model of tourists’ creative experience (Tan et al., 2012), taxonomy of creative tourist (Tan et al., 2014), the interactions of tourists with their surrounding socio-material factors (Tan et al., 2015), cognition and preferences (Ting and Lin, 2015) or the influence of experiences on memories, satisfaction and behavioral intentions (Ali et al., 2016). This list is not exhaustive. Considering to this extended research, at this point, the development of further empirical studies is likely to make a modest contribution to the literature. However, it is noticed that the existing research is dispersed through many topics. It would be helpful for future research in creative destination competitiveness to have an integrative approach allowing understanding the creative tourist behavior and motivations. As such, it is suggested a literature review targeted at pinpointing the factors that attract and retain creative tourists. 3.5. Community The community plays an important role in the context of creative tourism, being not only a source of inspiration for new experiences and to acquire local knowledge (Hoarau, 2014), but also a fertile ground to identify new entrepreneurial opportunities (Yachin, 2019). Furthermore, collaborative activities within the community provide an interesting space to engage local stakeholders (Yachin, 2019), build trust (Czernek, 2014), and add value to creative tourist experiences (Dimmock, et al., 2014; García-Rosell, et al., 2019). This provides an interesting field to explore, especially to expand existing knowledge about the antecedents of cooperation around creative experiences. It will be interesting to understand to what extent stakeholders can be regularly involved in the activities offered to tourists. Comentado [WU7]: What is the relevance of this method here? 18 Another field to explore is sustainability in the context of creative tourism. The sustainability of a tourism destination is more related with small-scale tourism and with lifestyle entrepreneurs than big corporations (Shrivastava and Kennelly, 2013). The former are more concerned to buy local, to hire local people and with the preservation of the local culture, natural environment and traditions (Burnett and Danson, 2004; Jack and Anderson, 2002; Morrison, 2002). Furthermore, developing tourism within a community also contributes to increase visitors awareness and knowledge about the community way of life, contributing to value their local traditions (Giampiccoli and Mtapuri, 2017), which is an important dimension of creative tourism. As such, further research should aim to evaluate the contribution of the local community and other stakeholders on the development of the competitiveness of creative tourism destinations. Given the complexity of studying this area due to the existence of multiple actors, a qualitative approach is suggested, such as in-depth interviews, focus group and comparative or longitudinal case studies 4. CONCLUSION This article aims to present an integrative model of creative tourism destination competitiveness. This is a theme that has been earning attention from academics and has been the subject of analysis in its various dimensions. Researchers have explored aspects such as the motivations or characteristics of creative tourists, entrepreneurs, the concept of creativity, the importance of the place, among other topics. However, the competitiveness of the tourist destination, which basically includes all these aspects, has not been explored. Thus, this article presents a first approximation to an integrating model resulting from an analysis of the existing literature. This model is intended to be a basis for empirical studies that can study the interrelation between the various dimensions presented and add their critical perspectives. A second objective of this article was the presentation of guidelines for future research, so that each of its dimensions can be explored in greater depth and, in the future, to develop models for evaluation and measurement of creative tourism destination competitiveness, similarly to the competitiveness models of tourist destinations (c.f. Hanafiah, Hemdi and Ahmad, 2016). These existing models do not reflect the essence of creative tourism. As such, no attempt was made to adapt existing models, but rather to create a new model. Conflict of Interest statement 19 Nothing to declare Financial Disclosure statement Nothing to declare REFERENCES Abreu-Novais, M., Ruhanen, L., and Arcodia, C. (2016). Destination competitiveness: what we know, what we know but shouldn't and what we don't know but should. Current Issues in Tourism, 19(6), 492-512. https://doi.org/10.1080/13683500.2015.1091443 Ali, F., Ryu, K., and Hussain, K. (2016). Influence of Experiences on Memories , Satisfaction and Behavioral Intentions : A Study of Creative Tourism. Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing, 33(1), 85–100. https://doi.org/10.1080/10548408.2015.1038418 Anderson, J. (2012). Relational places: The surfed wave as assemblage and convergence. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30(4), 570-587. DOI: 10.1068/d17910 Arias, R. A. C., & Cruz, A. D. (2019). 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