What Really Matters is the Economic Performance : Positioning Tourist Destinations by Means of Perceptual Maps

The present study aims to cluster the world's main tourist destinations according to the growth of the economic performance of the tourist activity and of the tourist and economic development experienced during the last decade. With this objective, we combine the information from a set of tourist and economic indicators for the main 45 tourist destinations over the period between 2000 and 2010. Destinations are ranked with respect to their average growth rate over the sample period. By assigning a numerical value to each country corresponding to its position, all the information is summarised into two components (“economic performance of tourist activity” and “tourist and economic development”) via multivariate techniques for dimensionality reduction: multidimensional scaling (MDS) and categorical principal components analysis (CATPCA). By means of perceptual maps, we find that destinations can be clustered into four different groups. The first one, dominated by Western and Northern Europe markets, contains some of the top destinations (France, Spain and the United States). A second one, with a predominance of Mediterranean destinations (Cyprus, Greece, Italy and Israel), obtains high scores in both dimensions. In the third one, we find Cambodia and China, alongside Egypt and Turkey. Finally, a fourth group dominated by Eastern Europe destinations (Bulgaria, Croatia and Latvia) with low scores in both dimensions