The World Economic Forum’s Travel & Tourism Development Index was born from an evolution of its biennial Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index. theplanner.guru learns more about what this means and its relevance to Africa.
After 15 years of publishing its Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index (TTCI), the World Economic Forum has refined its methodology to bring together the Travel and Tourism Development Index (TTDI) released last week.
“The transition from TTCI to TTDI reflects the index’s increased coverage of travel and tourism (T&T) development concepts, including the expanding role of sustainability and resilience in T&T growth, and is designed to focus more attention on the sector’s role in broader economic and social development as well as the greater need for T&T stakeholder collaboration and integrated development strategies (local, regional and international) to mitigate the impact of the pandemic, bolster the recovery and deal with future challenges and risks,” the World Economic Forum noted on the TTDI’s portal, adding that the TTDI framework and methodology is intended to reduce index bias and improve flexibility in use and that despite these changes, the TTDI and TTCI remain very close.
TTDI benchmarks and countries
To derive an overall country index, this is broken down into five subindices. This is further split into 112 indicators that span across 17 pillars. It should be noted that the five subindices do not have a weighting on the overall index and are used merely for categorisation purposes. While the World Economic Forum advises against comparing the 2019 and 2021 indices, non-leisure resources, socioeconomic resilience and conditions, and T&T demand pressure and impact distinguish the TTDI from the previous TTCI.
The TTDI covers a total of 117 economies. Countries that were covered in the TTCI 2019 but that do not appear in the TTDI 2021 are Algeria, Brunei Darussalam, Burkina Faso, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Eswatini, Gambia, Guinea, Haiti, Iran, Jamaica, Liberia, Mauritania, Mozambique, Norway, Oman, Russian Federation, Seychelles, Uganda, Ukraine, Zimbabwe and Taiwan, China.
In Africa, Egypt has been ranked number one and 51st on the global index. Mauritius is second in Africa and 62nd globally, while South Africa is third in Africa and 68th globally.
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