A model of virtual enterprise in tourism: promoting a comprehensive destination promotion through temporary cooperation among local authorities.

The body of research on cooperation in tourism has grown considerably, addressing several opportuni-ties for decreasing the level of competition among prominent actors to gain the superior advantages of collaboration. Cooperation is recognized as the only way for a region to gain competitive advantage and is the key to achieving successful and sustainable promotion of a destination. Following the main liter-ature on the topic, this study borrowed from a model of temporary cooperation mainly considered for the manufacturing industry, the virtual enterprise (VE). Although widely applied in different domains, literature seems having not considered this model in the tourism industry before, although in use and opportunities are several for the destinations. This research suggested a model of VE for tourism, par-ticularly when cooperation occurs among Authorities in the tourism domain. A life cycle model was of-fered to fit the peculiarities of the industry and to highlight the main features of a temporary alliance among authorities, including the four main features of a VE: the pivotal role of the Destination Man-agement Organization, the relevance of information and communication technologies for the VE’s oper-ability, the short lifetime of the VE, and the overall destination promotion. A case history was also ex-amined to validate the theoretical construct.