Tourism destination zoning in mountain regions: a consumer-based approach

This paper puts into question the conventional way of delineating tourism destination borders in terms of taken-for-granted administrative boundaries. Despite the fact that the literature on destination boundaries advocates for conceptual frameworks where customers’ consumption patterns play a more fundamental role, instances of actual attempts of structuring tourism geographies into ‘new tourism areas’ are scant, and instances of zoning on the basis of visitors’ consumption patterns are absent. A method for identifying alternative and more effective consumption-based tourism zones that combines geographical information system and hierarchical cluster analysis techniques, and that relies on time distances between attractions, is thus proposed, and implemented in the case of the Pyrenees mountain region. As a result the region is restructured into nine new tourism zones, which, compared to the original destinations, are more uniform in size and have a higher correlation index between attractiveness and accommodation intensity; they also have different levels of cross-border intensity and are very similar to historical regions; and the more they differ from the original destinations the higher their attractiveness, which supports the effectiveness of the new zoning technique. Four types of tourism zones ranging from higher to lower tourism intensity are also identified.