ANALYSIS AND APPLICATION OF TOURISM COMPETITIVE MODELS TO TOURISM DESTINATIONS

The article discusses and evaluates theories and models of tourism competitiveness particularly those of Crouch and Ritchie (1999), Dwyer and Kim (2003) and World Economic Forum (2018). Wiklund, J., & Shepherd, D. (2005) the models enable and tries to enlighten more on how they facilitate the understanding and application of tourism competitiveness. World Travel and Tourism Council (2018) competitiveness in the travel and tourism industry is widely preached however, there is no uniform understanding and application of the concepts of competitiveness (Andrades-Caldito L Sánchez-Rivero, M. & Pulido-Fernández J. 2013). World Travel and Tourism Council (2018) evidently, there are many competitive variations among the top and advanced tourism destinations in the world. Austria is on position one in tourism infrastructural and products competitiveness, France is number one on tourists' visitations but the United States of America and China is number one on receipts/income realized from tourism. This clearly shows that if the models were perfect and uniformly applied then only one destination could have been number one in all aspects of visitation, infrastructural development, and income generated from the tourism industry. This clearly shows that there is a need for fresh research and development of the models to suffice the variations in the situation. The analysis, evaluation, and comparison of models is based on the research methodology, application (practice), variables used, assumptions and generalizations