Analysing how cultural factors influence the efficiency of tourist destinations in Chile

Abstract

The present work is framed within the line of research addressing efficiency evaluation of tourist destinations, where regions are taken as territorial units able to determine their tourist appeal, and tourist flow is taken as the variable to be optimized. A virtual production function is therefore devise considering tourist flows as output and accommodation capacity and other tourist and cultural resources as the main inputs. We examine Chile as case study, a country with a growing number or tourists and increased investment in tourist and cultural infrastructures. We follow a two-stage model, estimating regional performance using data envelopment analysis and analysing the impact of external variables on efficiency applying bootstrap techniques and truncated regression models. Empirical results show that cultural endowments and activities together with natural resources determine Chilean regional efficiency in optimizing tourist flow, particularly in attracting international tourism. Thus, policy recommendations to improve regional management of tourist and cultural attractions are derived. This study contributes to increase applications in tourist destinations efficiency in Latin America, where works are still scarce.

Achieving tourist destination competitiveness: Evidence from Latin‐American and Caribbean countries

“…Efficiency studies in the tourist sector using frontier methods have received little attention in this corner of the world, added to which most of the existing works have confined themselves to adopting a regional approach. To date, we are only aware of the work by Figueroa et al (), applied to the case of Chile and based on the two‐stage efficiency method. Other studies addressing issues related to tourism and efficiency, albeit tangentially, are the work by Román and Font () into tourist policy and sustainability in Chile, and Del Río () who examines tourist demand in the Chilean region of Maule.…”

“…This requires the construction of a hypothetical and virtual production function linking the tourist resources these territories possess to the outcomes achieved (Assaf & Josiassen, 2012;Soysal-Kurt, 2017). From the methodological standpoint, in order to gauge the performance of this input-output relation, the use of nonparametric methods, principally data envelopment analysis (DEA), is particularly common, given its ability to adapt to multioutput models, to name but one of its advantages (Cracolici, Nijkamp, & Rietveld, 2008;Figueroa, Herrero, Báez, & Gómez, 2017;Hadad, Hadad, Malul, & Rosenboim, 2012). In recent years, however, conditioned efficiency applications have come to the fore, where the use of DEA is complemented with a second-stage analysis, taking into account other external variables that might impact on performance (Bi, Lou, & Liang, 2011;Figueroa et al, 2017;Hadad et al, 2012).…”

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) for Measuring the Efficiency of the Hotel Industry in Ecuador

“…In Latin America, particularly in Chile, the study by Figueroa et al [21] was aimed at evaluating the efficiency of the regions in Chile and their capacity to attract tourist flows between 2009 and 2014. In this study, the regions were taken as territorial units that could determine their own degree of tourist attraction, so the tourist flow was adopted as the variable to be optimized.…”

Development, contributions and trends in regional studies in Spain: An overview

“…Gómez-Vega and Herrero (2017 and Figueroa, Herrero, Báez, and Gómez (2018). Some new contributions are peying attention to the case of the small towns, both from the touristic point of view and the historical and cultural heritage (Escalona-Orcao et al (2017) In summary, this is a very promising field, in which some Spanish researchers have already defined the lines to develop similar studies in other countries.…”