A New Tool for the Analysis of the International Competitiveness of Tourist Destinations Based on Performance

This article presents a new tool for the analysis of the international competitiveness of tourist destinations based on the evolution of tourist inflows. For this purpose, an adaptation of the conditional β-convergence to the tourist sector is proposed. Beyond the analysis of the growth rate of tourist flows, which is not comparable among countries, some of the specificities of this sector are considered in the competitive analysis, such as the different sizes of the markets and the maturity of the destinations, the business cycle, and so on. UNWTO data for international tourist arrivals and tourism receipts for up to 214 destinations and the period 1995 to 2016 are used to analyze the evolution of the competitiveness of major international tourist regions and some of the world’s leading tourist destinations. The results show the potential of the proposed tool for analyzing tourism competitiveness by offering a diagnosis in the short, medium and long terms