Fields of Tourism Innovation According to the Level of Investment

The aim of our study is to learn about the innovation models currently used by Spanish tourism companies and determine if there is any relation between the level of innovation and the sub-industry, the firms’ billing volume, how they manage their innovation efforts, the general innovation fields and the companies’ ranking of specific innovation focuses. Our findings reveal that hotels and tourist activity companies invest the most in innovation, while intermediation and transport firms and restaurants invest the least. However, there is no direct correlation between innovation investment levels and the different tourism subindustries. Contrarily, our results indicate that, as companies increase their billing volume, they dedicate greater resources to innovation. Similarly, though despite no significant difference, creating new products attracts more investments than technology in order to achieve differentiation. Also, the most innovative tourism companies apply significant resources to client orientation efforts while very few to cost reduction initiatives.