1. About the Travel & Tourism Development Index 2024

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.