Definition of a territorial tourist attractiveness index: a multivariate statistical approach

Abstract

Theoretical and effective tourist attractiveness should be evaluated at a very detailed territorial level. For this reason, we propose a selection of statistical variables measured at the municipality level, useful for the calculation of a tourist index on the basis of three compared statistical techniques. An empirical effort has been carried out on the 64 municipalities belonging to the Foggia province, with reference to year 2002. Finally, we have often stressed the operative usefulness of the final tourist indexes, both to correctly classify municipalities from a tourist point of view and to render easier the identification of the so called Sistemi Turistici Locali (STL).