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Tourism is showing how the globalisation is changing the industry’s competition dynamics, with a growing complexity of rules and companies structures. Actually, the traditional tourism system based on the hotels is increasingly threatened by modern and innovative forms of hospitality, which cause a continuous growth of the quantity and a variety of tourist flows. Tourism has shifted from a phenomenon addressed to a limited elite and focused on natural environment to a global and mass phenomenon such as we are now experiencing the Era of Tourism. So the Destination Management becomes the strategic process in which private e public actors manage attractiveness factors and tourist services to affect the global and national market demand.

In the last two years, some Mediterranean regions have obtained significant benefits from the contraction of large tourist investments marking contrasting trends, as in the case of Sardinia and other Italian and Spanish sub-regions (conceivably due to their perception as safer locations). In global tourism, security and safety have become complex issues with a wide range of components including consumer protection, legal protection of tourists, environmental security, disaster protection, data safety, personal safety in communication, quality assurance of services. The vulnerability of tourism to external negative events, such as tourism terrorism, has defined the increasing importance of tourism safety and security management in a global approach as an integral part of the tourism industry’s operations.

For a long time, tourism has been to many scholars of management a less than optimal choice in their academic and research strategies. Some of them would have probably even denied to tourism the status of “industry”. Even economists, including scholars of development, looked at tourism with skepticism. Low-tech, seasonal, knowledge-unintensive tourism was the worst of the possible post-industrial outcomes and no serious economic policy could be based on it. This scenario has changed very rapidly in recent years. Both internationally and in Italy, the number of scholars, institutes, journals, publications and teaching programs dealing with tourism has increased, involving several disciplines. Globalisation has also established new horizons in terms of tourism variety and development, encouraging the emergence of new tourist profiles. The traditional mass tourism model. has greatly changed, generating tourism supply and demand systems characterized by flexible production, organization and consumption models (dominated by the internet, the sharing economy, low-cost travel, B&Bs, etc.).