An analytical review of destination competitiveness´ indicators

Abstract

The role of indicators in assisting tourism planners and decision-makers in evaluating performances, setting targets and anticipating future scenarios has been widely acknowledged by scholars. The purpose of this study is to provide an evaluation of existing composite indicators of tourism destination competitiveness (TDC) and propose a statistical toolbox/protocol to assess their effectiveness in empirical evaluations. We built the study’s protocol by enriching the OECD technical guidelines to build composite indicators. The protocol contains now 15 criteria used to examine the reviewed indicators, among these two useful quality measures. Ten studies were identified as providing a composite indicator of tourism destination competitiveness. Indicators in the reviewed tourism literature barely frame the construct of TDC within its complexity and never purposely assess the measurements’ validity and reliability using the proper statistical tools. The review showed a lack of an explicit definition of TDC in most of the papers, this is somehow surprising since they all aimed at measuring the TDC.