World-Class Tourism City Construction: Quality, Level Measurement, and Mechanisms

The development of world-class tourism destinations is a key objective for China's cultural and tourism industry during the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021–2025) and is essential for enhancing and upgrading tourist spots. This paper focuses on Guilin, China's first world-class tourism city that has been elevated to a national strategy. It initially establishes an index system to evaluate the high-quality development path of such a city. Using the entropy method and linear weighted functions, it quantitatively assesses Guilin's evolution as a world-class tourism city. From a configuration analysis perspective, it explores Guilin's high-quality development path and mechanisms. The study clarifies the concept, connotation, and evolutionary pattern of world-class tourism destinations, elucidates their high-quality development path and driving mechanisms, and offers policy insights for creating a replicable, referable, and promotable high-quality city tourism development model.