Suchergebnisse

This article evaluates the effects of political instability, terrorism, and corruption on tourism development, particularly UNESCO-listed heritage destinations. Using a fixed-effects panel data analysis for 139 countries over the period 1999-2009, the result reveals that a one-unit increase in political instability decreases tourist arrivals and tourism revenue between 24% and 31% and 30% and 36%, respectively. Furthermore, in the presence of heritage, terrorism has negative effects on tourism demand even though its effect is lower than that of political instability. However, the study shows that an increase in corruption index would not have an adverse influence on tourist arrival numbers, particularly for those countries that have historical and natural heritage. Perhaps, many experienced travelers have expectations that they would require paying bribes to corrupt authorities for travel visa or permits to some tourist destinations in order to make things accessible. Moderation effect results indicate that political instability reduces tourism demand even in UNESCO-listed heritage destinations

Purpose- Qatar has placed its tourism sector as a focal sector in its economic diversification strategy. The country aims to develop diverse tourism products, ranging from cultural, urban, and nature tourism to education. Qatar plans to invest $45 billion in the tourism sector to increase international tourist numbers to seven million per annum by 2030 (Gulf Business, 2014). Given these significant tourism investments, it is unquestionable that the country reaps commensurate long-term benefits in terms of growth of its tourism sector and possible ripple effects in other sectors of the economy. However, Morakabati et al. (2014) argued that the country's success in attracting tourists was limited due to several reasons. First, it lacks an appealing destination image. Second, civil liberty and political stability in the region are not well acknowledged by potential tourists and third, the country lacks strong promotions of religious and cultural traditions. This current research paper intends to conduct a comparative analysis of Qatar's tourism competitiveness with its strong rivals, namely the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The main objective of the paper is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of Qatar relative to the competing destinations based on a SWOT analysis. Methodology- The study employs the Global Competitiveness Ranking from Euromonitor and various tourism data sources from the World Bank and Google and conducts a comparative analysis to identify the strenghts, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) associated with Qatar's tourism relative to its competing destinations. Findings- The analysis reveals that the average daily cost of living in Qatar is USD160, which is considerably high compared to Saudi Arabia (USD31), Egypt (USD28) and Turkey (USD98). Even though Qatar's average daily cost is lower than the United Arab Emirates (USD198), the latter destination offers more variety of tourism products than Qatar. Furthermore, the competing nations have invested more resources in tourism development than Qatar. For instance, Qatar's capital investment in travel and tourism services in 2019 was the lowest (USD2.05billion), compared to the United Arab Emirates (USD8.2billion), Saudi Arabia (USD26.87billion), Turkey (USD21.31billion) and Egypt (USD16.2billion). In terms of global competitiveness ranking, Qatar performed the best in health and financial system among its competitors. Conclusion- Based upon the analysis, it can be concluded that Qatar has lost its price competitiveness to its neighboring countries. In order to increase its tourism, the country should focus more on developing the highest quality of health tourism products and targeting on wealthy health conscious tourists. Qatar may also consider creating opportunties for those who can afford to buy a property and live in Qatar as second-home residents.

This study examines the effects of an unfavorable political event or environmental hostility, namely, a blockade affecting international tourist inflows, and how tourism market diversification (TMD) could mitigate the adverse effects in the case of Qatar. To quantify these effects, we adopted a standard tourism-demand model and augmented it with a Herfindahl index (HI) for the geographical diversification of tourism exports, a dummy variable for the blockade, and an interaction variable. We further analyzed the tourist inflows from various regions using regional dummies and their interaction terms to capture the different impacts of the blockade on Qatar's inbound tourists from 46 source countries between 2006 and 2019. This study applied a panel-based differenced system-generalized method-of-moments estimation to reveal several interesting findings. First, there was a significant positive individual effect of TMD on inbound tourism. Second, during the blockade, Qatar witnessed growing tourist inflows from Asia and Australasia, the Americas, and Europe. However, the incident inevitably placed severe constraints on some tourist flows to Qatar, primarily from Middle Eastern and African countries. Moreover, although the HI has a positive impact on tourism growth, our study revealed that the interaction terms between the HI and the blockade are only statistically significant in some cases, implying that a diversification strategy cannot completely mitigate the harmful effects of a blockade on tourism due to the severity of blockade effect. Nevertheless, a TMD strategy appears to be successful at the individual level.