Performance Of Tourism Destinations: Evidence From Tunisia

This study uses data envelopment analysis and a two-stage procedure to compare the performance of Tunisian tourism destinations and to examine the impact of investment (public and private), economic circumstances, workers skills, and travel agent number on the efficiency of Tunisian tourism destinations. In the first stage, the efficiency score is calculated. This calculation is followed in the second stage with a bootstrapped truncated regression model examining the effects of the cited variables to determine the best development strategy that can increase the tourism competitiveness of Tunisian tourism destinations. This study has six major conclusions. First, the test results confirm that the destination efficiency is sensitive to public and private investment in the tourism industry. Second, the trade deficit has a significant negative impact on the efficiency of the country destinations. Third, tourism education and training in Tunisia do not meet the Tunisian tourist market needs. Fourth, the wage level in the tourism sector positively affects the performance of destinations. Fifth, whereas the number of Type A (hold and sell travel) travel agencies positively affects the performance of a destination, Type B agencies (only sell travels) negatively influence it. Last, tourism destinations have to develop commodities, tourism monuments, leisure activities, and other para-tourism activities to attract more tourists or to improve their length of stay.