Ranking World Tourism Competitiveness: A Comparison of Two Composite Indicators

Abstract

Assessing travel and tourism competitiveness (T&TC) is becoming an issue of paramount importance for stakeholders, mainly policymakers and practitioners. The availability of new databases such as the Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report from the World Economic Forum (WEF) has boosted this interest. This chapter contributes to the current literature in this field with an assessment of the T&TC of 136 world tourist destinations. In doing so, two well-known approaches are employed: Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) with endogenous common weights, and the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solutions (TOPSIS). World tourist destinations are ranked using these approaches, and both of the resulting rankings are then compared to the ranking provided by the WEF. Lastly, further analysis is carried out aimed at determining the main pillars and sub-pillars of T&TC, as a way to provide relevant insights to policymakers and practitioners. Our conclusion is that the two proposed methods are valid candidates for measuring the T&TC of world tourism destinations.