Kazakhstan is ranked 52 out of 119 countries in the Travel & Tourism Development Index 2024 published by the World Economic Forum. The nation shows good results in price competitiveness, hygiene, and security, but severely lacks in infrastructure and tourist services, QazMonitor reports.
What is TTDI: Introduced in 2022, the Travel & Tourism Development Index benchmarks and measures the factors and policies that enable the sustainable development of the Travel & Tourism (T&T) sector. This index is a direct evolution of the Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index, which has been published biennially since 2007.
The current edition of the TTDI covers 119 economies. New additions for the 2024 edition include Algeria, Barbados, Iran, Jamaica, Oman, Uzbekistan, and Zimbabwe. Meanwhile, Cape Verde, Chad, Hong Kong SAR, Lesotho, and Yemen have been excluded from the list.
The top 10 countries in the TTDI, ranked from tenth to first, are Switzerland, Italy, China, the UK, Germany, Australia, France, Japan, Spain, and the US.
Kazakhstan is positioned 52nd, neighboring Costa Rica in 51st place and Qatar in 53rd place. Among its regional neighbors, Kazakhstan performed worse than China (ranked 8th), but better than the Kyrgyz Republic (ranked 102nd), and Uzbekistan (ranked 78th). Russia and Turkmenistan are not included in the index.
Methodology: The majority of the dataset for the Travel & Tourism Development Index comprises statistical data from international organizations. The remainder is based on survey data from the World Economic Forum’s annual Executive Opinion Survey, which measures qualitative concepts or those for which internationally comparable statistics are insufficient.
Sources of statistical data include various UN agencies, Bloom Consulting, AirDNA, IATA, CoStar, and Tripadvisor, among others.
The overall TTDI score is computed through successive aggregations of scores, from the indicator level through the pillar levels, using a simple average to combine the components. Scores for each indicator are first normalized and rated on a common scale from 1 to 7, with 1 being the worst and 7 being the best outcome.
Kazakhstan’s performance: In the current edition of the TTDI, Kazakhstan earned a score of 4.07, climbing six ranks since 2019 to place 52nd out of 119 countries.
The nation demonstrated good results in several areas, including Price Competitiveness with a score of 6.14, Health and Hygiene at 5.98, Safety and Security at 5.69, T&T Socioeconomic Impact at 5.50, and ICT Readiness at 5.42.
Subpar and low results were recorded in the Human Resources and Labor Market with a score of 4.46, Prioritization of T&T at 4.31, Environmental Sustainability at 3.95, and Business Environment at 3.93. Challenges were evident in Natural Resources at 3.64, Demand Sustainability at 3.55, Air Transport Infrastructure at 3.19, Openness to T&T at 3.15, and Tourist Services and Infrastructure at 3.14.
The nation shows poor results in Ground and Port Infrastructure, which scored 2.82, Non-Leisure Resources at 2.22, and Cultural Resources at 2.07.