CLUSTER MANAGEMENT AS A DRIVER FOR REGIONAL TOURISM DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

The article seeks to explore contemporary issues of cluster management in the context of regional tourism development. The study demonstrates that in the realia of dynamic and wide-scale economic growth, the process of building a tourist cluster might become a powerful stimulus to boost infrastructure development and enhance business and economic competitiveness, both at the national and regional levels. It is argued that at present, tourism attractiveness remains a key driver of effective performance of each region and the country as a whole, as well as a promising tool to encourage domestic and foreign investment. The purpose of this article is to study the issues of cluster management as a driver for regional development. To attain the research objectives, mostly general scientific methods have been employed, in particular, analysis and synthesis, the method of abstraction and concretization as well as a monographic method which allowed drawing appropriate conclusions. According to the research results, the study suggests a new definition to a tourist cluster as a recreational area that covers cooperation of businesses and their activities united on a voluntary basis. An emphasis is put that the process of cluster building should consider aspects of infrastructure as well as the need to assess environmental and climatic factors. The authors offer their understanding of a tourist cluster development cycle, in particular, five main phases are presented: Phase 1 – identifying the cluster geographical location, Phase 2 – assessing tourism development in a region, Phase 3 – government and legal regulation of cluster management, Phase 4 – evaluating the cluster specifics, Phase 5 – infrastructure enhancement. It is argued that the creation of tourist clusters provides a strong growth impetus to economically weaker regions and promotes tourist inflows which through the money spent within the cluster will ultimately contribute to strengthening the region's economy. The findings have revealed that to attract investment into the regional tourism industry, there is a need to launch a range of organizational and economic processes that would facilitate capital attraction to the tourism infrastructure in each tourism cluster. The research provides evidence that tourism clusters add quality dimensions to the regional economic development paradigm as well as contribute to boosting effective partnership of government institutions and business entrepreneurship. Within the scope of this study, cluster management is viewed as a solid background for cooperation between business sector actors and the government which offers an opportunity to enhance the effectiveness of collaboration between public sector, business entrepreneurship, trade associations, research and education institutions, etc. Apart from that, in the context of building regional tourism clusters, among other objectives, there is a critical need to multiply investment into tourism business and assign target capital primarily to create and operate general purpose infrastructure that will be utilized by tourists and regional community population as well.