Destination Competitiveness and Sustainability: Heritage Planning From the Perspective of the Tourism Industry Stakeholders

Introduction

The travel and tourism (T&T) business employs a significant fraction of the global workforce and provides substantial opportunities for countries to grow and prosper (WEF, 2015). In 2015, T&T generated $7.2 trillion (9.8 percent of the global GDP), employed 284 million people (or 10 percent of all employment globally), and is expected to expand by 3.3 percent in 2016 (WTTC, 2016). The T&T sector lost about $4.5 trillion to reach $4.7 trillion in 2020, with its contribution to GDP declining by an astonishing 49.1 percent, compared to the global economy's GDP decline of 3.7 percent in the same year. Due to ongoing mobility limitations, the T&T industry backed 10.4 percent of global GDP in 2019. In 2020, this payment was reduced to 5.5 percent. Sixty-two million jobs were laid off in 2020, representing an 18.5 percent decrease; 272 million people were left covered worldwide, fewer people than in 2019 (334 million). Countless livelihoods are now reinforced through retention programs and fewer working hours by the government, and they may be eliminated unless T&T fully recovers. Native visitor spending floored by 45 percent, whereas international tourist expenditure floored by 69.4 percent (WTTC, 2020). Although established nations traditionally hold the highest echelons of the Travel & Tourist Competitiveness Index (TTCI), developing economies have mostly pushed tourism development in recent years (WEF, 2015). Many emerging-market locations are endeavoring to improve as well as maximize their capacity to draw tourists and serve travelers coming from both domestic and foreign markets.

Tourism, aka the leisure industry, is widely acknowledged as necessary for progress and a significant foundation of revenue, employment, and currency generation, particularly in developing nations (Dupeyras & MacCallum, 2013; WEF, 2015). The tourist sector is also crucial in externally endorsing a nation's image in addition to worldwide reputation and influencing internal policy. To gain a competitive advantage in the tourism business, each location needs to make sure that its total visitor experience and allure outperform the plethora of other alternatives available to potential visitors. Visitation to any existing and prospective area is inextricably linked to its overall competitiveness, regardless of how that word is defined or assessed. To maintain destination competitiveness (DC), it is essential to consider the description of resources, the distinction between created, endowed, and support resources, destination management, and cyclical circumstances. The prodigious additional worth of these concepts is the accumulation of a collection of elements in critical extents of DC valuation, which, considering their possibility, permits comparable evaluation on a worldwide scale, even though the weight given to each of these factors varies depending on the culture of each nation (Ruiz & Gândara, 2013).

Economic viability has typically been used to assess a location's competitiveness. The introduction of triple-bottom-line accounting has increased the need for planners and managers of a destination to address long-term management of the destination's natural, cultural, and social resources (Crouch & Ritchie, 1999). The term “sustainable tourism” was established to address the aforementioned issue. The World Tourism Organization (WTO) (UNWTO, 2022) delineates sustainable tourism as “tourism that fully accounts for its present and future economic, social, and environmental impacts.”