Tourism Destination Competitiveness Research Of African Countries

Competition is the inevitable product of market economy, whether developed or developing country, are all faced with competition from the social, technological, cultural, political and other fields at different levels. With the tourism industry become one of the world's largest and most dynamic industries, competition between tourism destinations is much more fierce. In order to achieve development goals, tourist destinations should have a clear understanding and effective measurement of their own competitiveness. As a result the evaluations of the tourist destinations competitiveness become a new research field and hot spot.African tourism industry started late first in North Africa, mainly expanded to the sub-Saharan Africa since the 20th century 70s. Rich natural and human tourism resources provide favorable conditions for the development of tourism, as many countries take it as a vigorous new industry. But compared with the international tourism industry, Africa gets small market share, uneven development and weak competitiveness of most countries.Based on the competitiveness theory, tourist destination system and sustainable development theory and other related theories form a large number of domestic and international researches. Using tourism, economics and related principles to collate and summarize some concepts. The paper redefines the composition of tourism competitiveness, analyses factors which affecting the tourism competitiveness, describes the evolution process. By the Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Report 2008 released from the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC)about 130 countries in the world. The paper select Egypt, South Africa, represented by seven countries in Africa for empirical research. After PCA method, Tunisia, Mauritius rank first in seven countries and Africa. Other countries are basically consistent with the official announcement. Through the comparison of advantages and disadvantages of the tourism development among the seven countries, combined with the importance of each evaluation index, strategies to enhance the competitiveness of national tourism are proposed, which can also improve the competitiveness of the whole of Africa.Through various theoretical and empirical researches, the article concludes: Tourism is a multi-level and multi-factor complex system, an national or regional tourism competitiveness is not only in the real competitiveness, but also manifests in the potential future development of competitiveness. The development of tourism industry ultimately depends on competitive advantage rather than comparative advantage, the stronger the competitiveness is, the lower the resource is dependened. Africa is extremely rich in tourism resources, but the external conditions have hindered the healthy development of the tourism industry. Only from the system's point of view, balance social undertakings, the tourist destinations competitiveness can be fundamentally enhanced.