| Abstract |
The tourism industry is of great importance to many European countries today. Due to the growing needs of the demand side, the supply side needs to develop new products and approaches which people ask for today. One growing branch of tourism is the sustainable approach, one in which some of the main ideas include the ones related to sustainable development of a country, alongside environmental consciousness. Different world organizations that measure tourism competitiveness, such as UNWTO or the World Economic Forum, utilize economic and social variables to construct relevant indices. However, the sustainable aspect, as well as the environmental one especially, does not have many relevant weights in calculations. Existing empirical research that tries to rank countries, regions, and other relevant entities often neglects the sustainable aspect of tourism. That is why this research has the objective of including such aspects in the calculation and construction of a ranking system of the tourism industry in the selected European countries. Based on the yearly data for the selected European countries, selected approaches are utilized to obtain a robust ranking of the countries in the analysis. We present the rankings obtained by several Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods for crisp data. The methods that are used are the Reference Ideal Method (RIM), the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS, with two normalization procedures), the VIKOR method, the Full Multiplicative Form of Multi-Objective Optimization by Ratio Analysis (Multi-MOORA) and the Weighted Aggregated Sum Product ASsessment (WASPAS). In addition, new rankings are calculated from the sum of the rankings which result from the selected methods, as well as from an aggregated ranking. The sample includes 23 European countries, based on data (un)availability, for the period from 2008 to 2017. The selected variables include both economic measurements of tourism results, such as nights spent in a country and tourism contribution to GDP, as well as environmental variables such as tourism pressure, waste generation and treatment, water exploitation, investments into circular economy concepts, etc. The main results indicate that countries which have conserved a relatively good environmental quality, although not being economically the best ones, are the best over the observed period. Furthermore, based on the obtained results, a comment will be given on which aspects of the selected variables individual countries need to work on so that their rankings improve over time. Good practices will be also observed, so those insights can be achieved, and worst-performing countries can implement such an approach in the future. The contribution of this study relies on constructing a ranking system that takes into consideration the sustainability aspect of the tourism industry, which contributes to the sustainability of the whole economy of a country as well. |