Festivals as an important determinant of destination competitiveness: a case study of Serbia

Today’s global tourism destination marketplace is all about
striving to attract new or repeat visitors, fulfilling their
expectations, attracting them to talk about their positive
experiences and motivating them to expand their expectations.
Consequently, countries are looking for ways, tools,
practices, and marketing strategies to track and guide their
activities in order to achieve the desired performance levels.
Tourism represents a significant source of wealth in many
countries, while for others it is still an undeveloped opportunity
and unutilized economic resource. Serbia is located in
the middle of the tourism bonanza with substantial growing
opportunities. However, there is an ongoing pressure from
the stakeholders to examine the Serbia’s position in the destination
marketplace and determine if Serbia is maximizing
its competitive position in the region and globally.

The paper analyzes a competitive position of Serbia as a
destination in the regional tourism market and how it measures
up against its neighbors. The regional market includes
Serbia’s neighboring countries enhanced by Austria, Slovenia
and Greece to provide a better view of the competitive
landscape of the Southeast European region herein called
“Extended Balkan”. The region has a population of 90 million
with the economic activity of $1.1 trillion. Annually,
the region attracts 90 million foreign visitors who spend
about $70 billion. The fact that Serbia with 7% of the region’s
population attracts less than 2% of visitors and revenue calls
for evaluation of its competitive position and analysis of its
practices in the tourism destination market.

The gap and IPM analysis is applied to the selected number
of global secondary indexes to highlight the differential
effects that impact Serbia’s position in different domains
and categories, which in turn, has a profound effect on
Serbia’s ability to attract, delight and retain visitors. The
gap analysis shows that Serbia significantly falls behind the
region in 29 out of 33 indicators. The IPM analysis shows
the areas in which Serbia falls behind are significant factors
in determining Serbia’s position in the tourism destination
market. The negative outlook is particularly evident in the
levels of foreign receipts and arrivals, tourism contribution
to GDP, and the national brand value.

The analysis shows that economic center of gravity points
to the above average performance on the outskirts of the
region and the gap in the middle with two countries, Macedonia
and Bosnia and Herzegovina, falling significantly
behind. Furthermore, the analysis shows that Serbia lacks
a comprehensive positioning strategy for creating, managing,
monitoring and tracking its position in the region and
globally. In particular, the underperforming areas that need
improvement are awareness, attractiveness, contribution to
GDP, value and strength of its country’s brand, reputation,
sustainable practices, corruption, legal and business climate,
innovation, ease of doing business, human development
and competitiveness. The overall suggestion is that Serbia
needs a more holistic approach with an integrated synergy
mechanism to maximize the effects of its different resources
and programs in order to improve its position in the region.
The emphasis of this theoretical paper is on the concept
and methodology rather than on the selection of indexes.
As the Iinternet makes global data readily available, there
is a growing trend among academics, scholars, researchers
and practitioners to benefit from high relevancy of the
global indexes. On the other hand, IPM method allows for
flexibility in mixing and matching different indexes with
the specifics of a particular country. The paper caters to
both practitioners and academics by contributing to the
literature on destination competitiveness through the lens
of the positioning theory.