Factors Influencing Visitor's Choices of Urban Destinations in North ...

also found that almost half of the visitors to a cultural sight expected to be entertained.Other motivations included a visit in order to learn new things and experience “theatmosphere” of the place.Lew’s work (1987) focused on the attractors of a rural destination and ranked a range ofgeneral factors that influence the attractiveness of a destination. The most importantfactors were the natural beauty and climate followed in order by cultural and socialcharacteristics, attitudes towards tourists, accessibility of the region, infrastructure of theregion, price levels, sport/recreational facilities and shopping/commercial facilities. All ofthese results relate to the quality of the tourist’s experience at the attraction itself, andsuggest the importance of measuring this quality in classifying an attraction.Destination Competitiveness LiteratureDestination Competitiveness Literature describes key foundations for developing acomprehensive tourism model. Not only the core resources and attractors of thedestination are important, but also the destination management, destination policy andmacro and microenvironment help to define a successful tourism sector.“Competitiveness in the tourism sector is defined as the ability of the tourism marketenvironment and conditions, tourism resources, tourism human resources, and tourisminfrastructure in a country to create an added value and increase national wealth. That isto say, ‘the competitiveness in the tourism sector’ is not only a measure of potentialability, but also an evaluation of present ability and tourism performance 21 ”. Articles byKim (2000), Crouch and Ritchie (1999 and 2000) and Dwyer and Kim (2001) provide avaluable discussion on this topic.“A Study on an Evaluation Model for Competitiveness of the Tourism Industry”Kim (2000) developed a competitiveness model for the tourism industry and itsindicators. The model has four dimensions of competitiveness including primaryresources of competitiveness (i.e. environment and resources); secondary sources (i.e.tourism planning, tourism management, and tourism investment, etc.); tertiary sources(i.e. tourism infrastructure, attractiveness of resources, reception system, etc.); and afourth level of sources related to tourism demand, tourism employment and tourismexport. These four categories determine the competitiveness of a tourism industry.Criticism: One of the main criticisms 22 of this model is that the categories used to definethe components of this model are somewhat arbitrary. There is no justification to theassignment of resources to each level (primary, secondary, tertiary, and level four). Inparticular, there is some inconsistency as to how the “resources” are defined among thefour categories. Some overlap appears to occur.Similar to the Crouch-Ritchie model, Kim’s model is linear and thus it fails toacknowledge potential interactive effects between different sources of destinationcompetitiveness 23 .21 Kim (2000).22 Ibbd.23 Ibbd.45