PROPOSAL OF DESTINATION COMPETITIVENESS INDEX

Since the leisure time increases, the means of transport and communication improve and the economic opportunities become more efficient, more people travel with each passing year. This indicates that tourism revenue of national economies continues to rise. Therefore, countries compete with each other to attract more visitors. Since the contribution of tourism to economy is highly important, especially for developing countries such as Turkey, each province has to know its own tourism potential and has to plan its marketing activities according to this. In this study, the destination competitiveness index (DCI) has been created by taking into consideration the common features of the models, commonly used in the literature and explaining the factors affecting the competitive capacity of the destinations. Multi-criteria decision-making methods (AHP, TOPSIS, PROMETHEE, MOORA) have been used in the evaluation of the destination competitiveness which is a subject affected by many criteria. The DCI developed for Turkey is tested with the data obtained from 81 provinces and a high correlation is acquired between the obtained rankings and the actual tourism performance rankings. This situation indicates that the explanatoriness of the developed DCI is high