Competitiveness Indicators in the Travel and Tourism Industry

The competitiveness of tourist destinations is important, especially as countries strive for a bigger market share. However, competitiveness is a complex concept, encompassing various aspects that are difficult to measure. This paper discusses an innovative approach for measuring tourism competitiveness using eight main indicators – price, openness, technology, infrastructure, human tourism, social development, environment and human resources – for over 200 countries. Weights for each theme are derived using confirmatory factor analysis in order to compute an aggregate index, and it is found that the social and technology indicators have the highest weights while the human tourism and environment indicators have the lowest. Cluster analysis is used to group destinations according to their performance level. The USA, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Australia are found to be the most competitive destinations, while Burkina Faso, Chad, Benin, Ethiopia and Cambodia are the least competitive.