Abstract

According to modern trends, tourism offer becomes more and more diversified. The most important feature of tourism products is complexity, and this, together with the experiencecentric demands, sets the tourism enterprises before new challenges, highlighting the necessity not only for product, but process and organizational innovations, too. The aim of our research is to study how different forms and models of cooperation, and the consequent joint marketing activities can effectively contribute to successful tourism innovations, product development and management, analyzing the examples of a specific field of tourism. Cultural routes have a special, determining role among tourism products. We have analyzed the possible problems and means of solutions arising from complexity—occurring in the course of development and realization—and also the criteria of marketability and competitiveness. Our starting hypothesis is that the more complex a tourism product is, the more broader and well-planned cooperation, that is the so-called stakeholder-management is necessary between the enterprises and community (non-profit) tourism organizations. We have carried out our research within and after a Hungarian-Slovakian project aiming to develop joint tourism packages along thematic routes. We have examined the co-operational abilities and intensity of the tourism actors in both countries. Solutions mixing business and social marketing techniques equally appeared in the development and management of cultural routes as complex tourism products, but, at the same time, they have not formed an efficient cooperational system. Our tested, competence-marketing based cooperational model, introduces the determining actors of  heritage-based cultural routes, emphasizing the importance of the existence of an adequate coordinating-managing marketing organization. According to our results, the absence of such an organization hinders the successful operation of cultural routes, which was confirmed by the comparison of an effectual Swiss example and a similar Hungarian tourism product initiation.

Keywords: Cultural routes, Cooperation, Social marketing in tourism, Stakeholder management