Canary Islands competitiveness vs. perceived safety: Mediterranean competitors markets

Abstract

The maintenance of competitiveness of a mature tourist coastal destination is connected to the management strategies, capable of repositioning the image of the destination and competing in better conditions with other destinations. The 2018 data and the provisional data available for 2019, despite denoting a negative average annual growth, continue to keep the Canary Islands with the best data in Spain, and it is the destination that have suffered less the recovery of competitors and the economic slowdown of the last years. Since 2016, the high point of these last years since 2011, there has been a deceleration of tourist arrivals in parallel in the Canary Islands, suffering even in 2018 a setback in relation to the year 2017. The data of the last three years, must necessarily relate to the behaviour they have had in the same years, three destinations, direct competitors of the Canary Islands; Tunisia, Egypt and Turkey. The main objective of this paper will be to analyze tourism demand evolution through detailed statistical data and link them to perception as safe destinations based on the International IPK report. In this way, we can obtain an approximate forecast of these destinations in the next years and the degree of sensitivity to unsafe situations, emphasizing the security conditions of our destinations.