A review on tourism destination competitiveness

By D. Cronjé, E. Plessis. 2020

170 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The term competitiveness is a well discussed research theme in various subject areas and research fields. Most of the research conducted on tourism destination competitiveness are based on the work of Porter, but prior to this, the issue of competitiveness was developed as a scientific discipline by Smith in the late 70's. Due to the reason that tourism is primarily a service driven industry, tourism researchers had to adjust definitions, develop new models and identify factors that would be applicable to the tourism industry. The main purpose of this research was to conduct a comprehensive review on previous and current research conducted on tourism destination competitiveness to provide insight and clarity on the work that has been done on this diverse topic. The review concentrated on 121 obtainable and usable articles that focused on tourism destination competitiveness. The key findings of this review reveal that (1) tourism destination competitiveness will remain a popular research topic within the tourism industry that will enable destination to keep their market share; (2) most research case studies were based in Europe and therefore emphasise the need for focus on other continents as well; (3) the majority of the research studies were conducted from a supply side and (4) forty-eight (48) of the articles focussed on the factors/indicators/aspects of destination competitiveness. By having more insight into the literature of destination competitiveness, future researchers can more effectively answer current research questions related to an ever changing tourism industry. This will further enable them to base the studies on a solid foundation of literature.

Subfields: Geography, Planning and Development, Sociology and Political Science, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/320f130f3dee143926918433b6dfc1d24ddfcded