Developing a Domestic Model for Tourism Destinations Competitiveness Measurement in Iran

It has been a long time since competitiveness measurement concept was introduced to the tourism research literature for the first time. Since the introduction of the first model by Porter in the 1990s, several models have been developed for various destinations. A domestic model however, has not been developed yet for Iran's tourism destinations based on the specific variables of Iran. For this purpose, as the first stage of the present study, in order to derive the variables for the domestic model, library studies have been utilized by reviewing the valid models in the literature and the selection of variables appropriate to the tourism destinations of Iran. Then, in order to complete the variables, qualitative interviews with tourism experts, public sector managers and private sector activists were carried out until theoretical saturation was reached. For the purpose of placing the variables into the indices, the CFA method has been used. For collecting the quantitative variables, library resources and formal statistics have been gathered, and for qualitative data, a structured questionnaire filled by the destinations’ tourists has been applied. The indices' weights were derived from pairwise comparisons executed by tourism experts and for the weights of the variables, the WEF method was used. In the end, the developed model has been presented in 9 indices consisting of security, infrastructures, facilities and destination’s services, competitive pricing and destination environment, human resources, environment, attractions and events, destination’s management and planning and information. There are also 64 variables in the subset of these indices.