Study of the Caribbean tourism destinations' competitiveness through composite indicators

Abstract

Tourism is frequently viewed as an important engine for the economic growth and development for both, developed and developing countries. Consequently, the number of new tourist products and markets is constantly rising worldwide. Therefore, the competence among tourism destinations in attracting more visitors and investors is also on the rise. As a result, tourism destination competitiveness has become a principal topic in the field of tourism research and its importance has augmented the debate regarding its definition and measurement tools. In this respect, the present research aims to propose new feasible and reliable tools to measure the competitiveness of the tourism destinations of the Caribbean region, which is one of the most intensely and tourism-dependent regions worldwide. To this end, a variety of studies are presented towards the proposal of composite indicators to measure this phenomenon. Certain comprised techniques are based on mathematical procedures that strive to guarantee the higher explanatory power of the global measures proposed. Furthermore, they attempt to overcome those aspects that have been criticised of the Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Index of the World Economic Forum. The present studies analysed tourism competitiveness from either two perspectives, and propose static and dynamic measures A total of 33 destinations are included, almost twice the number of countries from the region included within the editions of the Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report. Furthermore, diverse sets of indicators have been employed. The results of the static measures demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed methodologies the measurement of tourism destination competitiveness and its closeness to the World Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Index. First, the proposed methods enable all the information provided by the World Economic Forum to be utilized. Additionally, less information can be employed to attain results close to those provided by the Global International ranking. This is a major finding that may lead to the inclusion of developing countries into the Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Index. The dynamic methods developed herein attain outputs consistent with the predictions of the World Travel and Tourism Council. The analysis comprised all the available information within a given time span and, therefore, the intermediate scores influenced the results. Moreover, the dynamic indicator provides a detailed information regarding the change in competitiveness over time of a tourism destination and enables the cause of the improvement in the level of competitiveness to be determined, whether it be due to internal improvement of its performance or to changes relative to external issues.