Destination Competitiveness Index

The model organizes competitiveness into five groups of determinants. Core resources and attractors are the primary reasons to visit, such as scenery, climate, culture, and events. Supporting factors and resources provide the enabling foundation, including infrastructure, accessibility, hospitality, and enterprise. Destination management covers marketing, quality, stewardship, and the organization that makes the most of what exists. Destination policy, planning, and development provide the vision and positioning that steer the destination. Finally, qualifying and amplifying determinants, such as location, safety, cost, and capacity, moderate the outcome and can cap or magnify potential. The index scores a destination across attributes within all five groups.

Operationalizing the framework as an index means scoring a destination on attributes within each determinant, normalizing those scores to a common scale, assigning each attribute a weight that reflects its importance with the weights summing to one, and then aggregating by summing each score times its weight into one composite. The resulting number can be benchmarked against competitor destinations, and the difference can be decomposed attribute by attribute to show exactly where advantage is gained or lost. The weighted-sum form keeps the index transparent, but its conclusions depend on the scoring and the weights, which should be made explicit.

A competitiveness index measures the supply-side competitive position of destinations, scoring them on determinants and benchmarking one against another, and is aimed at destination managers and policymakers. A destination choice experiment instead models the demand side, estimating how individual travelers trade off attributes when choosing among destinations. The index tells you which determinants make a destination strong relative to rivals; a choice experiment tells you how much specific attributes shift real travelers' decisions. They are complementary: choice-based evidence can even inform the weights used in a competitiveness index, but the two answer different questions and use different methods.