Tourism Competitiveness and Cultural Resources in the EU: Travel and Tourism Development Index-Based Analysis

Cultural heritage is central to tourism competitiveness, yet its role as a competitive asset remains unclear in many heritage-rich destinations. This paper uses the Travel and Tourism Development Index (TTDI) as a proxy framework to examine cultural resource intensity and indicators associated with event-related activation capacity in relation to tourism performance across EU member states. Through cluster analysis, we identify cultural resource profiles, and via regression-based normalization, we evaluate tourism performance while controlling for population size and cultural intensity. Within the TTDI, cultural activation is captured indirectly through indicators which capture the intensity and structural capacity of cultural assets relevant for tourism performance, treating events as channels that transform cultural endowments into measurable tourism outcomes. This method allows the identification of systematic patterns of relative over- and under-performance. The findings reveal a competitiveness paradox: destinations with abundant cultural assets lead in absolute tourism volumes, but those with more modest cultural stocks often exceed expectations once scale is considered. Some destinations with fewer yet more effectively used cultural resources perform above expectations, suggesting that observed competitiveness is more closely associated with the effective activation of cultural assets than on sheer cultural richness. The paper also shows that regression-based normalization is methodologically valuable for exposing structural competitiveness differences that per capita indicators can obscure.