Tourism in algeria between territorial attractiveness and competitiveness of the destinations

The territorial attractiveness is at the articulation of the competitiveness of the touristic destinations concept. Requiring some introductory explanations, the first correlation, the one between competitiveness and attractiveness, can appear as a truism. To be attractive, a territory must be competitive and vice versa. it is however not that obvious particularly in our case study Algeria, A country with 2.38 million km² -encompassing many façades from the coastline, through the Atlas Mountains, the steppes of the Highlands, to the South with the Hoggar, the Tassili-N'Ajjer, the far southern Sahara, and the Touat Gourara.

An American researcher, Allan A. Lew (1987), established a framework for the tourism "lures". Lew proposed a definition to attractiveness as: “The basic element on which tourism is developed" (Lew, 1987: 554) if we consider the definition of Lew the Algerian territory is extremely attractive while the different indicators of world ranking of Algeria in terms of competitiveness are far from this image, therefore, being attractive does not necessarily mean competitive. This definition brings out a substantial problem, related to the measurement of attractiveness. On what basis can we say that one territory is attractive or that it is more attractive than another? What indicators are used to classify the territories according to their degree of attractiveness?

Through this paper we will present and analyze the various methods and synthetic indicators used worldwide to measure or evaluate the attractiveness and competitiveness of a territory and apply them to our case study.