Assessing tourism sustainability in European Union countries: A multi-directional benefit of the doubt composite indicator

We propose a composite indicator for the assessment of tourism sustainability in European Union (EU) countries relatively to years 2019 and 2021. Our proposal is a revisitation of the Travel & Tourism Development Index (TTDI), which is based on a uniform weighting scheme, by means of the Multi-Directional Benefit of the Doubt (MD-BoD) model, an innovative non-compensatory method able to derive a country-specific preference structure from the data. Thanks to the MD-BoD model, each pillar and elementary indicator receives a score that reflects the potential improvement of the country relatively to an empirical benchmark, therefore it is possible to objectively identify weak and strong dimensions of tourism sustainability before and after the Covid-19 pandemic. As such, our composite indicator represents a valuable support for the design of policies aimed at increasing the resilience of the European tourism ecosystem.