Determinants of Tourism Destination

Recent conceptual work on tourism destination competitiveness has proposed a comprehensive approach that adds industry-level competitiveness attributes to more conventional tourism destination attributes. This study builds on these ideas by generating sets of both attributes, developing a methodology for assessing their relative importance and examining the degree to which their relative importance varies across locations. Survey data were gathered from tourism industry practitioners in three closely competing destinations in Asia Pacific and were subjected to statistical testing. The results provide strong empirical support for the inclusion of both industry-level and destination attributes in studies of tourism competitiveness. The results also question approaches to competitiveness that assume that the relative importance of attributes is common across locations, suggesting, rather, that the importance of competitiveness attributes may vary across locations, depending on product mix and target market segments, especially in complex, multifaceted industries such as tourism.
Keywords: destination competitiveness; industry and destination factors; comparison across destinations Competitiveness is increasingly being seen as a critical influence on the performance of tourism destinations in competitive world markets. At a general level, industry competitiveness has become an established topic for researchers, policy makers, and practitioners, having expanded considerably since the publication of Michael Porter’s (1990) wellknown work. Tourism destination competitiveness, in particular, is becoming an area of growing interest among tourism researchers (see particularly Crouch and Ritchie 1999; see also Chon and Mayer 1995; Faulkner, Oppermann, and Fredline
1999; d’Hauteserre 2000; Hassan 2000). Pearce (1997,
p. 25) considers that “at a time when tourism worldwide is becoming increasingly competitive . . . all insights into the

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