A Comparative Analysis Regarding European Tourism Competitiveness: Emerging Versus Developed Markets

Abstract

In the current economic context countries are exposed to long-term structural shifts that challenge tourism development strategies and range from destination marketing to product offerings and infrastructure planning. In emerging countries, domestic and regional travel represents a highly promising tourism market in its nascent stage; even it has not yet reached significant volume because of low average levels of disposable income. However, domestic travel can mean a massive volume of tourist activity (Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Report 2011 - World Economic Forum).In this respect, in the present paper we aimed at carrying out a research on the European countries tourism competitiveness using statistical tools. Our analysis is based on the 14 pillars described in the Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Report 2011 - World Economic Forum (http://www.weforum.org/reports/travel-tourism- competitiveness-report-2011) taking into consideration only European countries. In order to see how the 14 pillars of the competitiveness index are grouping on the 27 EU countries and the other 15 non-EU countries, we used - separately for EU countries and non-EU countries – the principal component analysis (PCA) with varimax rotation and Kaiser normalization, followed by hierarchical cluster analysis and then the k-means cluster analysis to view the countries clustering on the principal components resulted.