Sustainable competitive advantage in tourism organizations: A strategic model applying service dominant logic and tourism's defining characteristics

• Need to understand how competitive advantage might be achieved in tourism contexts
• But the industry lacks a model which embodies tourism's defining characteristics
• The tourism and services management and strategy literature is reviewed.
• 11 characteristics of tourism are identified and the service-dominant logic and strategy concepts are discussed.
• A model is presented demonstrating conceptually how sustainable competitive advantage might be achieved in tourism.

This paper reviews the tourism, services, and strategic management literatures to produce a model, which demonstrates conceptually how sustainable competitive advantage might be achieved in tourism. The model brings together service-dominant logic, the defining characteristics of tourism and emphasizes the rapidly changing environments tourism organizations face by incorporating the dynamic capabilities framework. The defining characteristics of tourism are identified and the implications of these for managerial decision making are considered. The clear implication for managers is that in accordance with the resource based view (RBV) of strategy, the way in which resources are allocated, deployed and combined is critical to achieving commercial success. However, in tourism specifically, this process has to be determined by reference to the services orientation of the industry and in particular the eleven characteristics of tourism that are identified.