Tourism supply chain and its projection in Cuba. A look from demand management.

Abstract

In the tourism industry, research on the supply chain constitutes a competitive advantage, since it gives the possibility of knowing what the client wants and how to satisfy those needs. Consequently, one of the strategies of the tourism industry to increase said competitiveness is to achieve effective management in their supply chains. Specifically, knowing how to adequately manage and forecast tourist demand is a source of information that allows the economic actors involved in the activities, as well as the institutions in charge of the destination, to know their behavior and what their essential elements are, which allow them to make decisions at favor the growth and development of tourist destinations. In Cuba, tourist networks present innumerable deficiencies associated with correctly forecasting the behavior of the market. Therefore, the objective of the research was to project the tourism supply chain of the sector in the country through the identification, representation and definition of the economic entities that comprise it and the collaboration between each one of them; as well as the description and assessment of the involvement of these actors in the organization and management of the tourist demand, to face the critical problems of Cuba in this sense. The methods used were analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, information search, semi-structured interviews, and expert criteria. The main result was the identification of the key factors that affect demand management in Cuba and the methods to forecast it.