The impact of status on inter-destination coopetition

Coopetition between tourism destinations has recently gained importance. Building on the insight that status is a key consideration in partnership formation, this study takes a status-based perspective to extend the destination management literature. We develop hypotheses suggesting that three types of destination status — prestige, dominant, and iconic — are negatively associated with coopetition propensity and test them on a sample of 470 officially classified tourism destinations in France. We find partial support for a negative association between prestige status and coopetition and support for a negative association between dominant status and coopetition. However, the proposed negative association between iconic status and coopetition is not significant. This study contributes new knowledge within an emerging research field on inter-destination coopetition.