Sustainable tourism tags to reward destination management

Abstract

This paper presents a system of Sustainable Tourism Tags to evaluate the management of tourist destinations, using the information from a composite indicator called the Differential Dynamic Index. This vectorial indicator has two components: one dynamic which shows the advance or regress in time of each destination in terms of sustainability; the other static that compares the situation, at a moment of time, of each zone using multiple benchmarks according to each territory's physical characteristics and tourist activity. The sustainable tourism tags are awarded to the places which show advances, thus rewarding the work carried out by their managers. This system is a practical tool to link the evaluation of the indicator with the planning and management decisions of the destinations. We therefore define a linear programming problem which enables, for each destination, determining the minimum change necessary in the indicators to improve their qualification in the tag system. Finally, we present a case study for the urban destinations of Andalusia (Spain) that illustrates the practical application of the proposed tool.