AN EXPLORATORY STUDY OF CONVENTION DESTINATION COMPETITIVENES FROM THE ATTENDEES' PERSPECTIVE: IMPORTANCE-PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS AND REPEATED MEASURES OF MANOVA

Destination competitiveness has become a prominent part of hospitality and tourism literature. Competitiveness, however, is not easily defined or uniformly calculated because a number of diverse factors must be considered. Although meeting planners' site selection criteria has been studied in existing convention destination research, the attendees' perspective has rarely been examined. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the indicators that affect a convention destination's competitiveness in the eyes of convention attendees. Data were collected from three trade shows hosted by three different convention destinations, which resulted in 696 usable responses for data analyses. Importance-performance analysis (IPA) was implemented on seven attributes of convention destination competitiveness. In addition, the overall destination competitiveness indices were calculated to see the relative competitiveness among the destinations. Repeated measures of MANOVA were conducted to complement and to offer valid interpretation of the IPA results.