Proposal of destination competitiveness index

Since the leisure time increases, the means of transport and communication improve and the economic opportunities become more efficient, more people travel with each passing year. This indicates that tourism revenue of national economies continues to rise. Therefore, countries compete with each other to attract more visitors. Since the contribution of tourism to economy is highly important, especially for developing countries such as Turkey, each province has to know its own tourism potential and has to plan its marketing activities according to this. Tourism product cannot be marketed with a single marketing mix like conventional commercial products. Therefore, countries market their entire country not as a single destination but as multiple smaller destinations that will meet the various needs of different visitors to compete in the tourism sector. This causes the cities in the country to come to the forefront in the destination competitiveness. Cities are geographical areas that have a very complex structure within themselves. Therefore, each city which aims to be a destination as a tourism product has to take into consideration many factors. In this study, the destination competitiveness index has been created by taking into consideration the common features of the models, commonly used in the literature and explaining the factors affecting the competitive capacity of the destinations. Multi-criteria decision-making methods (AHP, TOPSIS, PROMETHEE, MOORA) have been used in the evaluation of the destination competitiveness which is a subject affected by many criteria. The DCI developed for Turkey is tested with the data obtained from 81 provinces and a high correlation is acquired between the obtained rankings and the actual tourism performance rankings. This situation indicates that the explanatoriness of the developed DCI is high. Key Words: Destination Competitiveness, Destination Marketing, Destination Ranking, Tourism Marketing, Multi Criteria Decision Making Methods