Measuring Tourism Sustainability: Proposal for a Composite Index

Abstract

The methodological bases are established for the design of a global composite index, the ST index, to measure tourism sustainability. Tourism sustainability is a fairly complex concept due to its latent, multidimensional and relative nature. A method based on factor loadings is proposed to construct a global tourism sustainability index. After comparing it with various theoretical approaches, the authors apply it to the Spanish system of environmental tourism indicators. The robustness of the proposed ST index is tested by calculating composite correlations between the Euclidean distances of different tourism destinations.