Interpreting and analyzing the competitiveness of tourism destinations

The changes of the touristic market created new power relations among the players. Because of the fierce competition between destinations, more and more attention is paid to the competitiveness of destinations. I encountered the subject matter at the beginning of my doctoral studies, when during my field-work I confronted the problems of Hungarian rural destinations with their human destinies and institutional problems, which „breathed me in” and motivated further research. This book contains my PhD research work, highlighting the theoretical issues of destinations’ competitiveness, with a focus on cluster-theory, assuring a proper analytical framework for the question “What assure the competitiveness of a destination?” Being highly committed to the topic, it was important to undertake a deep, qualitative analysis, showing the most important cultural and organizational factors as well by analyzing one Hungarian and two Austrian cases. As a result of the research, the differentiated analysis of destinations’ competitiveness was carried out, emphasizing the main differences between the Hungarian and international cases, and between destinations in different stages of development.