Around the world tourism industry represents economic benefits to the countries in where the tourist attractions are located. The purpose of this chapter is to search and review recent researches related to the area of tourism under supply chain management and optimization models perspectives. The main aim of this chapter is to identify and discuss how the tourism supply chain is studied when it is subject to different economic, market, and optimization strategies. Considering the period of 2005 to 2016, a systematic review was performed using research studies in the area of tourism supply chain management. The results show that game theory is used as a theoretical base in the majority of the cases, but several novel approaches are also incorporated to the analysis. This review can be used as a complement of the previous works and a valuable information source for the decision makers involved in the tourism area.
TopIntroduction
Talking about tourism implies an intensive management of several activities including planning, evaluation of tourism services, promotional and discounts tracking, and the different offers to attract new customers to the destiny. This idea leads us to think that it is necessary to develop an analysis of the cost-benefit relation applied to all the stakeholders involved in this field.
From the customer’s perspective, tourism is used to satisfy the human desire for fun, recreation, and the undefined motive to seek and explore the unknown and unseen (Tisdell, 2013). It includes activities of people travelling to and staying in places outside their conventional environments. Another concept given by Franklin (2003) associates the tourism with modernity, where the society experiences novel changes and ways of communication, thus the outcome is an extension of the spatial range from the home to outer space.
On the other hand, economically speaking, tourism is a fast-growing economic activity in many countries, benefiting the development of nations due to the employment generation, stimulation of investment, infrastructure development, and foreign exchange earnings. In this direction, some previous studies have reported an increase interest in the tourism industry. Literally, there are thousands of papers related to tourism. In fact, worldwide, tourism is considered as one of the fundamental economic activities, that contributes in the progress of the economy. It is important to remark that the success of the tourism industry relies in the optimal use of all the factors belonging to the productive tourism chain. Some of them are the tourism resources, tourism services, public services, social and cultural activities, among other offerings. Figure 1 shows an example of how the tourism flow is linked and how the stakeholders are related.
Figure 1. Example of tourism flow routes and stakeholders
However, the competitive environment forces the tourism industry to create a synergy enhancing its components in order to generate value to tourists. It is here, when a problem arises, due to the fact that there is a high number of variables associated with the tourism chain; making hard to optimizing it. For example, in many cases the activities, such as promotional and marketing, are set aside in the evaluation of the supply chain, generating mislead results due to the missing variables during the problem modeling. This particular situation has motivated to the researchers around the world to take the challenge of developing models and algorithmic tools to assess the entire productive chain in the tourism real world problems.
From other point of view, the tourism incorporates information technologies (ITs) in the development of its activities. For instance, the new commercial formats (e-Tourism, online travel agencies, trip-online advisors and others) have changed drastically the tourism industry into a more complex system. Additionally, the globalization and the fast communication among the stakeholders in the tourism supply chain have evolved into a difficult environment where dynamic models play an important role for taking decisions. Therefore, the tourism industry needs to be analyzed from an integrated perspective.
This has led to the authors to respond the need to classify the models from which the tourism can be evaluated; this sort will help to develop an analysis employing both perspectives: the optimization and supply chain models.
The main purpose of this chapter is to identify and describe briefly different approaches applied to the tourism supply chain management, focusing on the taxonomy of different mathematical models. If the reader needs more details about the mathematical expression of the models, please refer to the cited reference. For this, a literature review was done in order to identify a possible connection between the supply chain management and the optimization models. In advance, several settings such as tours, sustainable tourism, hotels and destinations are employed to classify the research works according to application.