Strategic alliances for the development of sport tourism products: the case of the Portuguese nautical stations

• Autor(a) principal: Aghdash, Vahid Mokhtarnezhad
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.1/20084
• topic: Alianças estratégicas; Estações náuticas; Estratégia de comunicação; Proposta de valor; Tomada de decisão; Turismo desportivo; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Outras Ciências Sociais

Nautical tourism is a tourist product with great development in the European space and a lot of potential to promote and develop tourist destinations. The aim of this study was to analyses the strategic alliances for the development of the offer of nautical tourism products, namely to analyses the decision-making, the value proposal, communication strategy and the selling process adopted by nautical stations (NS) in Portugal. This study is classified as applied descriptive research through the use of qualitative methods. Between September and December 2021, 17 Portuguese nautical stations application forms were collected and all 17 certified NS application forms were imported to NVivo for content analysis as a new standalone project created for this purpose named Nautical Project. Results show that decision-making processes are taken by the majority of partners in a Nautical Station Council, but the dynamics vary between NS. In terms of value proposition, the NS' main value for the NS stakeholders were the aggregation, diversity, and distinctiveness of the region's tourism offer, as well as innovation, reduction of seasonality, and increased spending per visitor. The communication strategies focus was organizing press trips, creating a NS tab in the municipality platform, and developing websites. In the majority of the NS the selling process was done through direct reservations with the different companies of the destination. Future studies could further examine the role of strategic alliances in enhancing destination competitiveness, explore how digital marketing strategies can support the creation of innovative products and services in NS and investigated about the evaluation of the costs and benefits of a communication and selling strategy in the context of the strategic alliances. An analysis of the models of decision-making process in the NS, as case studies, could improve the knowledge related with strategic process in sport tourism. It is worth mentioning that future research must go into the field to observe strategic alliances in action.