A Guest Mix Approach to Analysing City Tourism Competition

Chapter 8 builds on previous results published in the first edition of this reader. Section 4.1, Part IV, of the first edition presented ‘A guest mix approach’ to assessing and visualising the competitive relationships among 16 European tourist cities as reflected in the guests’ distribution by nationalities. If two cities A and B exhibit very similar proportions of their guest nationalities it is likely that the CTO managers of A pay the same attention to each of these guest nations as the managers of B. In other words, the analysis rests on the assumption that the CTOs base their marketing effort on a geographical segmentation approach. This does not seem to be a severe restriction as it corresponds to customary strategy guidelines followed by many tourist organisations.