Tourism Destination Competitiveness: From Definition to Explanation?

This article contributes to the recent literature on tourism
destination competitiveness including the gargantuan com-
pilations of competitiveness factors by Ritchie and Crouch
(2003), or Dwyer and Kim (2003), and, particularly, the
widely known prototype of a Competitiveness Monitor (CM)
initiated by the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC).
The central question underlying this article is whether an
arrangement of data such as the CM can be transformed
from a purely definitional system into an explanatory model.
A number of criticisms regarding the way of constructing the
CM, its epistemological nature, and the absence of any
accessibility factors lead to a moderately revised system that
is explored by latent variable modeling. The empirical find-
ings support this type of model, which tends to better explain
the levels of tourism activity already achieved than sus-
tained tourism growth. A discussion of the detailed results
produces several recommendations on how to adjust the
future strategy of research on destination competitiveness.