Avaliação da competitividade turística do território

Assessing the touristic competitiveness of the portuguese territory. On a local scale, sustainable tourism entails the development of an attractive pattern consistent with the framework of territorial resources and market expectations. Such a pattern should therefore be adaptive to any changes in the demand in new and dynamic terms, appealing to the territorial features of the local context. Hence, the analysis of territorial resources comes to play a key role in the development of tourism policies, providing local stakeholders with the competitive skills necessary to make their own strategic choices and to plan territorial of an area with the aim of identifying the more appropriate strategic positioning, meant as a tourist -attractive configuration. This could allow the area itself to express its full potential without rejecting, on the one hand, its identity and vocation (spatial coherence) and, on the other hand, the specific requirements of the touristic market (market consistency). In order to be effective, tourism planning must be based on a model of analysis of competitiveness which should be able to understand and interpret the territorial vocations, transposing them into indications of prescriptive nature for political acting development paths. The paper proposes a method for assessing the touristic competitiveness.