SECTORAL ANALYSIS OF DESTINATION PRICE COMPETITIVENESS: AN INTERNATIONAL COMPARISON

The competitiveness of an industry is a critical determinant of how well it performs in world markets. In particular, it is important to pay particular attention to the price competitiveness of a country’s tourism industry, compared to that of its competitors, if the industry is to continue to prosper. While previous studies of destination price competitiveness have focused on the tourism industry in aggregate, an advantage of the present method of constructing price competitiveness indices is that they can be disaggregated so as to provide information on a destination’s price competitiveness with respect to different sectors (e.g., accommodation, organized tours, shopping, etc.). This article has two aims: first, to highlight the results of constructing price com petitiveness indices for key sectors of tourism and to identify changes that have taken place over the past decade; second, to discuss the implications for tourism research and to identify strategies that may be formulated to maintain/enhance a nation’s price competitiveness in key tourism sectors.