Measuring local tourism attractiveness: The case of Italy

Tourism attractiveness is a key factor in destination marketing yet its measurement has been underresearched. This exploratory study presents a methodology for the measurement of tourism attractiveness applied at a provincial level in Italy. Potential drivers of attractiveness were collated using provincial-level data from the Italian National Institute of Statistics. A final list of drivers was subjected to Principal Components Analysis (PCA) to determine underlying structure, and then compared across the 107 Italian provinces using Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA). The PCA revealed one general tourism attractiveness index which was supplemented by three other factors that covered more specific input drivers. Cartographic representations of the principal component scores and the ESDA clusters showed a range of provincial attractiveness profiles.