Attractiveness and Effectiveness of Competing Tourist Areas A Study on Italian Provinces

Tourism has become a wide-spread phenomenon in our age and a focal point of economic policy of many regions competing for the favours of tourists. Consequently, competitiveness of tourist destinations has received increasing interest in economic research with a view to the identification of the user attractiveness of a tourist area. The present paper is inspired by the conceptual competitiveness model developed by Crouch and Ritchie and presents an attempt to assess the relative attractiveness of tourist destinations on the basis of aggregate tourist strength of competing destinations. The main novelty of the present work is formed by the micro-based foundation of tourism attractiveness of competing areas (regions, cities, sites, etc.). The methodology deployed here uses individual survey questionnaires on the tourist’ evaluation of the supply of tourist facilities and attributes in a given area (the ‘regional tourist profile’) as the basis for constructing an aggregate expression for the relative attractiveness of this area. The paper seeks then to estimate the competitive attractiveness of Southern regions in Italy and compares next findings on tourist effectiveness with results on tourist efficiency from a previous study.