Destination Competitiveness and Sustainable Tourism: A Critical Review

Tourism Attraction can increase the sources of revenue and subsequently improve a destination’s performance, but the statistical significance of the potential attractors need additional research and Tourism discipline can offer the necessary tools for these strategic decisions. To this end and in contrast with monitoring reports based on descriptive methods, in this paper we use the two-stage Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to analyze the performance of Spanish tourism regions for the period 2008-2011. We apply the Simar and Wilson (2007, 2011) double bootstrap procedure in order to investigate to what extent the efficiency of a destination is determined by a group of contextual variables. This two-stage procedure has supposed a turning point in the methodology and there are only a handful of very recent studies of this type in the literature on destination competitiveness. Policy makers should act in consequence with the results derived from the proposed methodology. Spain is the first country in the 2015 WEF competitiveness index and following UNWTO recommendations, it is essential to move towards responsible tourism in all aspects. We address some final considerations about the link between competitiveness and sustainability of the Spanish touristic model.