A classification methodology for assessing countries in terms of tourism competitiveness

Smirlis, Yiannis (author), Ioakimidis, Marilou (author)

Tourism industry is important for national economies, and, in this regard, it is vital to monitor its competitiveness. The Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Index (TTCI), developed and reported by the World Economic Forum, serves this purpose by providing a consistent framework, explanatory factors, and corresponding data sets. In this paper we exploit the past data sets of this index, First, to verify that in several countries, competitiveness in tourism and travel industries hardly changes over time. Next, we identify countries that show consistency in travel–tourism competitiveness and separate them into classes of best, worst, intermediate, and ambiguous past performance. Building on such a classification, we apply linear discriminant analysis (LDA) as an alternative to the TTCI computational framework in order to compose the new synthetic index TTCI-LDA, which assesses countries’ competitiveness. The analysis of countryscores obtained from this index has revealed that ICT readiness and touristic service infrastructure are important for tourism competitiveness. The score thresholds for the best–worst country cases in each class provide additional useful information for management, benchmarking, and policy decision making.

• Language: English
• Keywords: travel and tourism competitiveness index, linear discriminant analysis, weighting of composite indicators, classification
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: EF - School of Economics and Business
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Year: 2024
• Number of pages: Str. 151-167
• Numbering: Vol. 26, iss. 3, article no. 1
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-164812
• UDC: 338.48
• ISSN on article: 2335-4216
• DOI: 10.15458/2335-4216.1339
• COBISS.SI-ID: 207660803
• Publication date in RUL: 13.11.2024

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Economic and business review
• Publisher: Ekonomska fakulteta
• ISSN: 2335-4216
• COBISS.SI-ID: 268649216

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• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
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