Assessing the Tourism Sustainability of EU Regions at the Nuts-2 Level with a Composite and Regionalised Indicator

Sustainability in the tourism sector has become a principal goal for destination management and for the strengthening of the competitiveness and attractiveness of destinations (Bell & Morse, 2012). There is, however, no absolute scale of spatial analysis for sustainability. In this paper, we propose regions as a unit of analysis. Our empirical approach aims to assign regional variability to an already existing and commonly used national indicator, making it possible to achieve a good compromise between data availability and the need to have access to universally comparable data while embracing the value of scaling down the monitoring process to consider detail at a more local level. The advantage of such an approach is that it combines the rich set of information from existing indicators with the wide availability of quantitative regional indicators freely obtainable from official statistical sources, such as Eurostat or ESPON (European Spatial Planning European Network). Our paper develops an application using the Tourism & Travel Competitiveness Index framework as a starting point, creating regional sustainability indicators for the 281 NUTS-2 regions (territorial units for statistics) in Europe. The first contribution of this approach is the regionalisation of a national indicator that allows monitoring of not only the individual level of sustainability of a destination, but also its standing among every other European region. The second is the creation of a practical tool that is able to continuously monitor and benchmark the sustainable development of EU regions, thereby supporting stakeholders in their decision-making processes