| Abstract: | The purpose of this study is to construct a framework for the evaluation of tourism destination’s competitiveness of cities in Taiwan, in order for the further use of practical evaluation in the future. The framework was conducted mainly based on the destination competitiveness theory, and some indices were revised according to the cities’ characteristics. As to the methodology, due to the existing literature which mostly adopted the Delphi or focus group techniques may ignore the construct validity, the study used the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to test the construct validity of the proposed destination competitiveness indices.
The main findings are as follows: (1) the proposed framework includes five dimensions and 27 indices, the five dimensions are "core resources and attractiveness", "tourism infrastructure", "supporting factors", "destination management", and "situation conditions". These indices have been demonstrated to be properly by 100 valid respondents from tourism suppliers; (2) As to the construct validity, five structures were proposed and tested by CFA, the results indicated that only 12 indices were left in the model, including sightseeing, tourism human resources, tourism policy planning, tourism marketing , travel information services, accommodation facilities, transportation systems, tourism services, environmental management, health and hygiene, entertainment, tourist shopping. These indices could be viewed as the determinants of city tourism competitiveness, which imply that subjecting to the budget constrain, the tourism sector can firstly use these 12 indices for practical investigation. |
