Assessing the tourism performance of the Mediterranean coastal destinations: A combined efficiency and effectiveness approach

Abstract

Abstract This paper assesses the comparative performance of the Mediterranean coastal destinations using data envelopment analysis, considering both the efficiency and effectiveness dimensions. The analysis does not only provide a benchmarking framework for the destinations, but a framework to reveal, in a comparative context, the trade-offs between efficiency and effectiveness, the sources of inefficiency, and the pillars of effectiveness, for each region. This paper advances the current literature in destination performance benchmarking, under the production frontier method, by incorporating the effectiveness dimension to the broadly used efficiency consideration. This advancement is of critical importance, considering that the results of this paper support the lack of a strong relationship between destinations efficiency and effectiveness. Therefore, individual destinations assessments, based only on one of the two performance dimensions, may lead to biased estimations that may mislead policy interventions.