Two-dimensional mapping of Asia Pacific destinations combining tourism and economic indicators

ABSTRACT

The present study aims to cluster five Asia Pacific destinations (Cambodia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Singapore) with respect to other countries according to the evolution of the main tourism and economic indicators over the period between 2000 and 2014. By assigning a numerical value to each country corresponding to its position, we summarize all the information into two components (“tourism expenditure and profitability of tourism activity” and “tourism development and economic growth”) using different multivariate techniques for dimensionality reduction. By means of perceptual maps, we find that the five Asia Pacific destinations can be clustered into three different groups: Hong Kong and Singapore, which are the most mature markets; Indonesia and the Philippines, with moderate growth rates in most variables; and Cambodia, with top positions in all variables, showing a huge potential in terms of growth and tourism development and the challenges derived therefrom.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourist destinations
• Asia Pacific
• positioning
• categorical principal components analysis
• multidimensional scaling

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Editor and two anonymous referees for their useful comments and suggestions. We wish to thank Laura Muñoz and Jacinta García at the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) for providing us with the data used in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Oscar Claveria http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9740-1852

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad) [ECO2016-75805-R].