Let’s take a quick look at South Africa’s current vision to be in the ‘Top 20 Tourism Destinations in the World by 2020 .

We must ask, why?

To be in the top 20 we’ll need to become a lot more like the countries that are there already, highly developed and close to high-volume, prosperous tourist-generating regions.

The World Economic Forum’s Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Index is the measure by which we normally position ourselves and in the space of two years South Africa jumped 12 positions from 64 to 48. How did we do this? I suspect it may simply be because the measures changed, some indicators were added, some removed.

How does the TTCI measure the competitiveness of a tourism destination?

The TTCI uses four key domains to rate and rank destinations. In 2015 they ranked 141 economies of the world on this scale: Each of these domains consists of a number of what they refer to as “pillars” under which a number of indices are used to rate a country.

This is a very generic set of measures. While I don’t dispute the value of assessing a destination on certain indices, there are several problems in ranking the tourism competitiveness of destinations on the basis of such a generic model.

For example, if one of the indicators is the incidence of malaria, then South Africa performs much worse than Sweden, simply because we have mosquitoes and they don’t. What about the goggas (insects) they have that we don’t?

South Africa hosted the World Cup in 2010, so on the measure of the number of sports stadiums in a destination we are clearly in a far better position than, for example, Namibia which really has only one big city, Windhoek. Does that seem fair?

In his research on competitiveness in Australia, Roger March asks: “Does the lack of five-star hotels in the Maldives and the abundance thereof in the Caribbean make the latter destination more competitive than the former? For some travelling segments, the lack of carrying capacity of the Maldives is very attractive and the commercialisation of the Caribbean little short of abhorrent.”

How does the TTCI measure images, uniqueness, experience? Are the Northern Lights viewed in Lapland more moving than Table Mountain?

Alain De Botton expresses it very well in his book, The Art of Travel, when he says “how a lengthy and ruinously expensive journey might be set in motion by nothing more than the sight of a photograph of a palm tree gently inclining in a tropical breeze.”

Perhaps we should again ask ourselves, why we want to be in the top 20 tourism destinations in the world?            

The TTCI also uses indicators that are undoubtedly important, but are they all equally important when tourists make a decision to travel to a destination?

There is a difference between an important indicator and a determinant indicator. If a tourist has to decide between going to Australia or coming to South Africa, climate will not play a role in his decision due to the climate being the same in the two countries. However, had he to choose between South Africa and Northern Europe, climate may well determine his choice.

The top 20 destinations in the TTCI are all countries that are close to major tourist-generating regions, which determine the number of tourists and their expenditure, but proximity to tourist-generating regions is not an indicator in the TTCI.

The TTCI is based on data received from countries and on data from opinion surveys.  One of the problems that developing countries often experience is the lack of data or the quality of the data in comparison to the sophisticated datasets that developed countries have. This will surely have an impact on their ranking. Developing countries, no matter how beautiful and enriching a tourism experience may offer, are generally found at the bottom of the index..

March says “Ranking the competiveness of destinations is an exercise in futility” because, he says, there are no absolute measures in tourism.

Tourism has a unique experiential quality that is not easily measured!

Furthermore, destinations don’t compete against all countries of the world, they compete against destinations that may provide similar experiences. They also don’t compete for all markets but for a market share from their source markets.

So the approach we took at the University of Pretoria in a recent study was to determine how we are performing against our competitors in terms of our source markets, looking at what determines choice, rather than what is regarded as important, and looking at indicators that influence our competitiveness rather than looking at how the same indicator influences the competitiveness of all destinations.

I will expand on this study in my next column.