Studying complex tourism systems: a novel approach based on networks derived from a time series

A tourism destination is a complex dynamic system. As such it requires specific methods and tools to be analyzed and understood in order to better tailor governance and policy measures for steering the destination along an evolutionary growth path. Many proposals have been put forward for the investigation of complex systems and some have been successfully applied to tourism destinations. This paper uses a recent suggestion, that of transforming a time series into a network and analyzes it with the objective of uncovering the structural and dynamic features of a tourism destination. The algorithm, called visibility graph, is simple and its implementation straightforward, yet it is able to provide a number of interesting insights. An example is worked out using data from two destinations: Italy as a country and the island of Elba, one of its most known areas.