Building composite indicators in tourism studies: Measurements and applications in tourism destination competitiveness Daria Mendola a , Serena Volo b, * a Department of Economics, Business and Statistics, University of Palermo, Italy b Faculty of Economics and Management, Competence Center in Tourism Management and Tourism Economics (TOMTE), Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy highlights  The proposed protocol can be useful to researchers interested in building composite indicators in tourism.  Available composite indicators of tourism destination competitiveness were analyzed and evaluated.  The assessment of indicators' ability to capture tourism competitiveness complexity showed the need for improvements.  The guidelines facilitate comparability, standardization and quality assurance of composite indicators. article info Article history: Received 24 March 2016 Received in revised form 11 August 2016 Accepted 12 August 2016 Keywords: Destination competitiveness Synthetic indicator Competitiveness determinants Index Guidelines abstract Composite indicators are useful tools to synthesize and monitor multidimensional phenomena. The aim of this paper is twofold: to offer the methodological foundations to build composite indicators in tourism and to evaluate a set of currently available composite indicators. Tourism destination competitiveness indicators constitute the object of this contribution. Their definitions, concepts and measures are analyzed and their evaluation is performed through the application of an original protocol. The results highlight that several methodological issues still surround the measurement of destinations competi- tiveness indicators. This paper provides tourism scholars and practitioners with a set of statistical guidelines to build composite indicators and with an operative scheme to assess indicators' effectiveness in empirical evaluations. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The role of indicators in assisting tourism planners and decision makers in evaluating performances, setting targets and anticipating future scenarios has been widely acknowledged by scholars (e.g. Croes, 2011; Crouch, 2011; Dwyer & Kim, 2003). Indicators help in tracking changes and identifying trends, and can be used to mea- sure outputs and reveal relative performance of entities (Volo, 2015). Particularly, composite indicators (CIs) are “much easier to interpret than trying to find a common trend in many separate indicators” (Nardo, Saisana, Saltelli, & Tarantola, 2005, p. 6). Depending on the number of input variables, indicators are: (a) individual or simple, in other words based on a single input vari- able, or (b) composite, which means based on two or more input variables. A composite indicator is a mathematical combination of individual indicators that represent different dimensions of a concept whose description is the object of the analysis (Saisana & Tarantola, 2002). By conveying rich and relevant information into a single figure, CIs provide social and economic policy makers with a holistic picture of the phenomenon under observation (Saltelli, 2007). In several scientific areas, CIs are well established tools to monitor social phenomena such as development, deprivation, so- cial exclusion, quality of life, well-being, pollution and other social issues (e.g. Sirgy, Efraty, Siegel, & Lee, 2001; Slottje, 1991; UNDP, 2014; Weziak-Bialowolska & Dijkstra, 2014). On the contrary, ex- aminations of social and economic phenomena in tourism are only * Corresponding author. Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Faculty of Economics and Management, TOMTE, Piazzetta dell'Universit a 1, Brunico-Bruneck, (BZ) 39031, Italy. E-mail addresses: daria.mendola@unipa.it (D. Mendola), serena.volo@unibz.it (S. Volo). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Tourism Management journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tourman http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2016.08.011 0261-5177/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Tourism Management 59 (2017) 541e553