Abstract
Tourism, like many modern industries of today, is essentially an assembly process. Very rarely does one organization or company control all the components, or all the stages of decision-making with respect to the creation and delivery of the tourism product. Consequently, in most industrial sectors and particularly in the tourism industry, it has become commonplace for organizations to collaborate in order to realize the goals they have charted out for themselves. "A key reason for the growing interest in collaboration in tourism is the belief that organizations and destination areas may be able to gain competitive advantage by bringing together and sharing their combined knowledge, expertise, capital and other resources" (Kotler et al., 1999b). Does networking within tourism destinations hinder innovation and freedom of choice? First it is necessary to define the key words in the question above, the key words being, tourism destinations, innovation and freedom of choice. Before talking about tourism networking, it has to be proved that tourism destinations do not hinder innovation and freedom of choice. Secondly, I will present my research on networking in tourism and cite its importance for a tourism destination (in particular for SME's). Finally, I will also manifest the idea that it hinders innovation and freedom of choice by comparing the potential problems and benefits of networking.
