An empirical analysis on the tourism competitiveness of Taiwan ─Application of Importantance- Performance Analysis (IPA)

[[abstract]]The researches on destination competitiveness have attracted many researchers’ interest in last decade. Nevertheless, prior researches did not pay enough attention on the exploration of destination competitiveness, nor had the empirical analysis of tourism competitiveness of Taiwan been found in the literature in Taiwan. Drawing of previous studies, this study summarized a set of destination competitiveness indices including 84 items for the empirical investigation of Taiwan’s tourism competitiveness based on the tourism suppliers’ perspectives. The Importance- performance analysis (IPA) technique was applied for the analysis of competitive advantage of Taiwan against competitors in Asia tourism market. The main findings are as follows: (1) Taiwan is facing a set of competitors in Asia tourism market including China, Japan, Thailand, Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Macau, in which China is the main one; (2) the IPA results indicated that eight of the 22 competitiveness items were in the “concentrate here” grid, which are the most important things the destination manager have to do for enhancing Taiwan’s tourism competitiveness; (3) there are significantly different perceptions among the government officials, tourism industry operators, tourism academic researchers on the importance of the competitiveness indices, suggesting the need of a platform for the communication among tourism stakeholders