Gay tourism in a sun and beach destination

Abstract

Gay tourism is seen as an attractive business opportunity for many destinations. However, there is a lack of research at identifying the resources necessary for success in this type of tourism. This work is aimed at filling this gap by using the premises of the resource based view and transfers them to the analysis of territories to identify the valuable resources that are required for a sun and beach destination to attract gay tourists. To this end, this study has focused on a gay tourism sub niche, tourists lodged in gay-exclusive resorts in Gran Canaria. In order to confirm the validity of this approach, the relationship between the satisfaction of gay tourists and the condition of the valuable resources was studied by means of a robust statistical new method, namely Bayesian model averaging. That method permits the inclusion of uncertainty in the theoretical models that determine destination competitiveness, thus reducing many of the problems that arise in the application of the more conventional statistical methods in this type of analysis.