Cooperation and competition during the resort lifecycle

The Tourism Area Life Cycle (TALC) model has been used on numerous occasions and situations to describe the destination development process but has rarely been used to explore more sophisticated and causal relationships between the development stages and other aspects of working relationships including cooperation and competition between tourism businesses in destinations. These relationships are influenced by the spatial proximity between individual firms at the local scale and agglomeration of tourism firms at the regional scales. Drawing on the knowledge of working relationships between tourism firms, this paper suggests an underlying conceptual framework for the study of the dynamic nature of the cooperation, competition, and spatial proximity between tourism firms and the interrelationships between these aspects throughout the TALC.