Sustainability Ranking for Cuban Tourist Destinations Based on Composite Indexes

Tourism sustainability evaluation has become an important issue in the development of this economic industry due to its dependence on natural environment quality and social acceptance. The study shows different ways to measure sustainability by means of composite indicators obtained from an initial set of quantitative and qualitative information. The use of different aggregation methods makes it possible to create rankings and offers remarkable contributions to the decision making process. We use the combination of dissimilar algorithms such as DP2 distance, Data Envelopment Analysis, Principal Component Analysis and Goal Programming to achieve these rankings and Borda Count to merge them into a single order to compare these destinations. Results shows different ways to measure sustainability using the overall information contained in a set of initial indicators and represent an important contribution to composite indicator’s building and for the formulation of new strategic actions, politics or other territorial or national projections.

[1]  Abraham Charnes,et al.  Measuring the efficiency of decision making units , 1978 .

[2]  Saurabh Gupta,et al.  An overview of sustainability assessment methodologies , 2009 .

[3]  Union européenne,et al.  Handbook on Constructing Composite Indicators: Methodology and User Guide , 2008 .

[4]  Sheng-Hshiung Tsaur,et al.  The Evaluation of Sustainable Tourism Development by Analytic Hierarchy Process and Fuzzy Set Theory: An Empirical Study on the Green Island in Taiwan , 2007 .

[5]  Ercan Sirakaya,et al.  Sustainability indicators for managing community tourism , 2006 .

[6]  Wei-Wen Wu,et al.  Beyond Travel & Tourism competitiveness ranking using DEA, GST, ANN and Borda count , 2011, Expert Syst. Appl..

[7]  Jo-Hui Lin,et al.  Evaluating ecotourism sustainability from the integrated perspective of resource, community and tourism , 2006 .

[8]  Laurens Cherchye,et al.  An Introduction to ‘Benefit of the Doubt’ Composite Indicators , 2007 .

[9]  Mark Holmes,et al.  Does the tourist care? A comparison of tourists in Koh Phi Phi, Thailand and Gili Trawangan, Indonesia , 2010 .

[10]  Gertrude Hirsch Hadorn,et al.  Ranking policy options for sustainable development , 2008, Poiesis Prax..

[11]  P. Nijkamp,et al.  The attractiveness and competitiveness of tourist destinations: A study of Southern Italian regions , 2009 .

[12]  Milena Lakicevic,et al.  Decision making in urban forestry by using approval voting and multicriteria approval method (case study: Zvezdarska forest, Belgrade, Serbia) , 2014 .

[13]  L. Salvati,et al.  Substitutability and weighting of ecological and economic indicators: Exploring the importance of various components of a synthetic index , 2009 .

[14]  Lawrence W. Lan,et al.  Promoting Food Tourism with Kansei Cuisine Design , 2012 .

[15]  Jose Manuel Cabello,et al.  Multicriteria development of synthetic indicators of the environmental profile of the Spanish regions , 2014 .

[16]  Fernando Ortega,et al.  Incorporating group recommendations to recommender systems: Alternatives and performance , 2013, Inf. Process. Manag..

[17]  Macarena Lozano-Oyola,et al.  The assessment of sustainable tourism: Application to Spanish coastal destinations , 2010 .

[18]  R. Caballero,et al.  La sostenibilidad de los destinos cubanos de turismo de naturaleza: un enfoque cuantitativo , 2014 .

[19]  J. Mcelroy,et al.  The Tourism Penetration Index in Large Islands: The Case of the Dominican Republic , 2005 .

[20]  P. Murias,et al.  An Economic Wellbeing Index for the Spanish Provinces: A Data Envelopment Analysis Approach , 2006 .

[21]  D. Gursoy,et al.  Resident attitudes - A Structural Modeling Approach , 2002 .

[22]  Sheng-Hshiung Tsaur,et al.  The evaluation of airline service quality by fuzzy MCDM. , 2002 .

[23]  Soumitra Sharma,et al.  Principal component analysis (PCA) to rank countries on their readiness for e-tail , 2008 .

[24]  R. Sharpley,et al.  Tourism Development and the Environment: Beyond Sustainability? , 2009 .

[25]  Ralf Buckley,et al.  Evaluating the net effects of ecotourism on the environment: a framework, first assessment and future research , 2009 .

[26]  Peter Glavič,et al.  A model for integrated assessment of sustainable development , 2005 .

[27]  M. Fuchs,et al.  Tourism Sustainability Through Destination Benchmarking Indicator Systems: The Case of Alpine Tourism , 2002 .

[28]  Marcelino Sánchez Rivero,et al.  Measuring Tourism Sustainability: Proposal for a Composite Index , 2009 .

[29]  Jesús Bernardo Pena Trapero.  La distancia P: un método para la medición del nivel de bienestar , 1978 .

[30]  Rabia Nuray-Turan,et al.  Automatic ranking of information retrieval systems using data fusion , 2006, Inf. Process. Manag..

[31]  J Kangas,et al.  Empirical study on voting power in participatory forest planning. , 2008, Journal of environmental management.

[32]  Giovanni Angelini,et al.  DEA-Like Model and Common Weights Approach for the Construction of a Subjective Community Well-Being Indicator , 2013 .

[33]  Rafael Caballero,et al.  Composite indicator for the assessment of sustainability: The case of Cuban nature-based tourism destinations , 2013 .

[34]  B. Reilly.  Social Choice in the South Seas: Electoral Innovation and the Borda Count in the Pacific Island Countries , 2002 .

[35]  Stefano Tarantola,et al.  Tools for Composite Indicators Building , 2005 .

[36]  T. Manning,et al.  Indicators of sustainable development for tourism destinations. , 2005 .

[37]  G. Waitt,et al.  The Boundaries of Nature Tourism , 2003 .

[38]  Cira Mendoza,et al.  A DEA Approach to Measure the Quality-of-Life in the Municipalities of the Canary Islands , 2013 .

[39]  L. Salvati,et al.  A composite index of sustainable development at the local scale: Italy as a case study , 2014 .

[40]  Rafael Caballero,et al.  Goal programming synthetic indicators: An application for sustainable tourism in Andalusian coastal counties , 2010 .

[41]  Serenella Sala,et al.  Sustainable performance index for tourism policy development , 2010 .

[42]  M. P. Alaiz,et al.  La calidad de vida en los municipios de la provincia de Valladolid , 2005 .

[43]  Loris Nanni,et al.  Detector of image orientation based on Borda Count , 2005, Pattern Recognit. Lett..

[44]  Claude Lamboray.  A comparison between the prudent order and the ranking obtained with Borda's, Copeland's, Slater's and Kemeny's rules , 2007, Math. Soc. Sci..

[45]  Ralf Buckley,et al.  Sustainable Tourism: Research and Reality , 2012 .

[46]  Josip Mikulić,et al.  An exploratory assessment of tourism sustainability in Croatian coastal destinations , 2011 .

[47]  R. Caballero,et al.  How to use sustainability indicators for tourism planning: the case of rural tourism in Andalusia (Spain). , 2011, The Science of the total environment.

[48]  C. Romero,et al.  In search of a natural systems sustainability index , 2004 .

[49]  Kirsten Holmes,et al.  Public understanding of sustainable tourism , 2010 .