A Classification Methodology for Assessing Countries in Terms of Tourism Competitiveness

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 country scores 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.