First introduced in 2022, the Travel & Tourism Development Index (TTDI) benchmarks and measures the set of factors and policies that enable the sustainable and resilient development of the Travel & Tourism (T&T) sector, which in turn contributes to the development of a country. The index is a direct evolution of the Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index (TTCI), which has been published biennially since 2007. By allowing cross-country comparison and by benchmarking countries’ progress on the drivers of T&T development, the index informs policies and investment decisions related to the development of T&T businesses and the sector as a whole. It also offers unique insights into the strengths and areas for improvement of each country to support their efforts to enhance the long-term growth of their T&T sector in a sustainable and resilient manner. In particular, the TTDI provides a strategic and holistic overview of the tourism economy, including internal and external enablers of T&T development and their interdependent nature. Furthermore, it provides a valuable platform for multistakeholder dialogue, enabling stakeholders to formulate appropriate policies and actions at local, national, regional and global levels.

The 2024 edition of the TTDI was produced in collaboration with the University of Surrey. As the index knowledge partner, the university provided valuable technical and strategic support for the TTDI and related content. This edition of the index also includes several improvements that are designed to take advantage of newly available data such as the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC)’s recently developed indicators on the environmental and social impact of T&T, to make the index more T&T-specific, concise and consistent in its country coverage.

Please note that the changes made to the index limit its comparability to the previously published TTDI 2021. Therefore, this release of the index includes recalculated 2019 and 2021 results, using new adjustments. TTDI 2024 results reflect the latest available data at the time of collection (end of 2023).

Many of the improvements made to the index are based on stakeholder feedback and input from the TTDI Advisory Group, which includes representatives from Bloom Consulting, the European Travel Commission (ETC), the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC), the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the International Air Transport Association (IATA), JLL Hotels & Hospitality Group, Mastercard, New York University, the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA), Trip.com Group, the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UN Tourism), the University of Surrey, Visa, the World Bank and WTTC.

In addition, the index relies on close collaboration with the following data partners: AirDNA, Bloom Consulting, CoStar, Euromonitor International, GlobalPetrolPrices.com, IATA, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), MMGY TCI Research, Tripadvisor, UN Tourism and WTTC.

For more detailed information on the TTDI methodology and the new framework, country peer and income-group classification, indicator details and partner information, and to explore the index results through interactive data visualizations, please visit the index website or see the Technical notes and methodology section of the report.

The index is comprised of five dimensions, 17 pillars and 102 individual indicators, distributed among the different pillars. However, the five dimensions are not factored into the calculation of the index and are used only for presentation and categorization purposes.

Figure 1: TTDI framework

The Enabling Environment dimension captures the general conditions necessary for operating and investing in a country and consists of five pillars:

The T&T Policy and Enabling Conditions dimension captures specific policies or strategic aspects that affect the T&T sector more directly and consists of three pillars:

The Infrastructure and Services dimension captures the availability and quality of physical infrastructure and tourism services and consists of three pillars:

The Travel & Tourism Resources dimension captures the principal “reasons to travel” to a destination and consists of three pillars:

The Travel & Tourism Sustainability dimension captures the current or potential sustainability challenges and risks facing T&T and consists of three pillars:

Most of the dataset for the TTDI is statistical data from international organizations, with the remainder based on survey data from the World Economic Forum’s annual Executive Opinion Survey, which is used to measure concepts that are qualitative in nature or for which internationally comparable statistics are not available for enough countries.

The sources of statistical data include, but are not limited to, AirDNA, Bloom Consulting, Euromonitor International, IATA, ICAO, the International Labour Organization (ILO), the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the IUCN, CoStar, Tripadvisor, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), UN Statistics Division, UN Tourism, the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Bank, the CIA World Factbook, the World Trade Organization (WTO), WTTC and the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA).

The overall TTDI score is computed through successive aggregations of scores, from the indicator level (e.g. the lowest, most disaggregated level) through the pillar levels, using a simple average (i.e. the arithmetic mean) to combine the components. Scores on each indicator are first normalized and rated on a common scale of 1 to 7, with 1 being the worst and 7 being the best outcome.

The TTDI covers 119 economies. Economies that were covered in the TTDI 2021 but are not covered in the TTDI 2024 are Cape Verde, Chad, Hong Kong SAR, Lesotho and Yemen. Economies added to the 2024 TTDI are Algeria, Barbados, Iran, Jamaica, Oman, Uzbekistan and Zimbabwe.