Health and Hygiene as a Factor of Destination Competitiveness: A Comparative Study Using Synchronic and Diachronic Data

ABSTRACT Health and hygiene is a provision of conditions to maintain public health, and make tourists feel safer and tourism destinations become more competitive. The existing research has been conceptual or critical, and scarce empirical studies focus mainly on single-case studies. Therefore, this study came to fill a knowledge gap and analyse the importance and relationship between health and hygiene and destination competitiveness through a case study of the world’s most visited tourism destinations. The study employed three techniques to analyse the synchronic and diachronic data of the destinations, i.e. comparative analysis, graphical analysis, and One-way ANOVA. The results show that health and hygiene are the most important of the 14 pillars measuring destination competitiveness. The graphical analysis indicates a positive correlation between the health and hygiene pillar and overall competitiveness. This study should be an impetus for applied scientific research for public health policy and tourism competitiveness.