Tourism attractiveness in Italy: Regional empirical evidence using a pairwise comparisons modelling approach

Abstract

This paper aims at deriving a ranking for the Italian regions by modelling domestic (interregional) tourist flows, in order to compare their tourism attractiveness. To this aim, a Bradley–Terry modelling approach was used to make pairwise comparisons of competing territories. This approach allows the inclusion of covariates that are, in this case, factors that likely affect domestic tourism flows across competing territories. Consequently, we consider a wide range of determinants within the theoretical framework of destination attractiveness. Furthermore, the empirical findings have been used to assign an attractiveness score to each region on the basis of which a ranking can be done, together with a measure of variability.