Towards a comprehensive view of tourism governance: relationships between the corporate governance of tourism service firms and territorial governance

Tourism governance comprises different levels and has been tackled from diverse perspectives, including regional governance, destination governance and corporate governance. However, this piecemeal approach risks overlooking interdependencies. Therefore, this paper integrates the literature on the relationships between the various levels of tourism governance into a comprehensive framework and highlights a lacuna of tourism governance research on tourism service firms. To close this gap and to integrate the service firm into the overall framework of tourism governance, this paper empirically investigates the linkages between the governance of tourism service firms and the governance of destination management organisations (DMOs) in a qualitative, GABEK-supported case study. The findings suggest that destination governance influences the strength of these linkages: weak links between the governance of firms and that of DMOs may be due to specific deficiencies in destination governance. In particular, institutional incongruence is proposed to induce such weak links.