SHAPETOURISM OBSERVATORY

These interactive maps represent an interpretative tool of turism dynamics based on the four dimensions: Reputation, Attractiveness, Competitiveness, and Sustainability covering the 52 Mediterranean Regions. These Maps can be explored at a Macro-Area level, a Regional level and at a single urban administrative division as well: each of them can be simply accessed selecting or zooming the area of interest. The colours represent the intensity of a specific observed index, and for each area a numerical output is made available in order to allow a deepening analysis. A ranking regional ordering can be obtained clicking on the Ranking chart button, so as all the raw data for any single index can be downloaded clicking on the Download button.
Reputation

Online public opinions using various forms of social media are generating challenges for the tourism industry, which is intrinsically a "reputation-dependent" domain. Electronicword-of-mouth (eWOM) has forced destination managers to rethink branding strategies, suggesting a shift from an architecture brand perspective to a live context perspective where travel markets are considered to be conversations and the monitoring of online conversations constitutes the first phase of a digital destination marketing strategy. Therefore, because eWOM might present ongoing social discussion about tourism destinations, and they represent one of the main sources of information for prospective travelers, who are the public interested in the destination, an analysis of eWOM is considered an efficient approach to indirectly measure public attitudes, beliefs, and values related to tourism destinations.

Attractiveness

The concept of attractiveness refers to how a place is perceived and what types of assets it has to offer to (different types of) residents and visitor. Regions endowed with specific forms of territorial capital (or bundles of them) are attractive to specific audiences.” (ATTREG project, final report 2012). The attractiveness index calculated for the ShapeTourism project is based on previous results from the ATTREG project, but includes updated and new information to measur regional attractiveness in med territories.

Competitiveness

The Travel and Tourism Competitiveness index (TTCI) provides a means to measure a country’s performance, and utilizes four sub-indices and their component parts to represent the overall quality, future potential and long-term sustainability of the tourism sector within each country assessed. For the ShapeTourism project we obtained a regionalized version of TTCI to analyse regional competitiveness among MED regions with the same structure of the original index.

Sustainability

UNWTO defines sustainable tourism as "tourism that takes full account of its future economic, social and environmental impacts, addressing the needs of visitors, the industry, the environment and host communities."