Guiding documents of the World Tourism Cities

Guiding documents of the World Tourism Cities

1 Goal and significanceWTCF is the first international tourism organization that unites tourism cities and develop

Release time : 2014-06-26 10:09:00

source : WTCF

arrivals and total tourist consumption.

(5) An interpretation of the tourism city rankings

The above four rankings, by influential international organizations, reflect the international mainstream perceptions and judgments of world tourism cities. There are both differences and similarities among the rankings. European, Asian, and American cities take up most of the positions and very few Oceanian and African cities are seen. Cities like London, Paris, New York, Hong Kong and Bangkok appear in the top 20 of almost every ranking. Two types of cities have secured top positions: metropolitan cities, such as New York and Paris, stand out for their size and scale. The other is medium or smaller cities with good tourism quality, such as Sydney, Cape Town, Marrakech and Siem Reap. Siem Reap is a small town with a population of 85,000 in Cambodia, but is ranked in the top 10 in two rankings. For Chinese cities, Hong Kong is among the top cities in most rankings. Beijing, Shanghai and Xi'an are also internationally recognized tourism cities in the world.

Overall, the different ranking methods might have resulted in ranking variation. There are mainly two approaches being used to rank the world tourism cities. One approach relies on tourists' subjective perceptions of the cities, which is based on large-scale research. The second approach involves index designing and data collection and processing. It is a very objective method, but due to the great divergence in city types, comparison is difficult because of incompatible data. This is why the rankings mentioned above only examined the international tourists numbers and the international tourism revenue, neglecting factors such as length, integral development of the city and tourism, and interaction factors between the tourists and the city.

Our interpretation points out that different evaluation standards would result in different ranking outcomes. Cities might be in different developmental stages and