Fonte: Journal of Tourism & Development; v. 1, n. 13/14 (2010); 287-298
Palavras-chave:
Resumo: The recognition of tourism impacts, the intensification of competition among destinations and theincreasing requirements of visitors have contributed to the growing recognition of the importance of tourism destinationscompetitiveness. The positioning analysis of cities may contribute significantly to identify strategies to overcome theweaknesses of a city and to maximize its strengths, so that the city may reach a better and distinct position in relation tothe competing destinations. Despite several studies to identify the image that visitors hold about cities have been carriedout, many of these studies only refer to one city, and most of the studies about more than one city, refer to cities of differentcountries, usually pre-determined by researchers. The city of Coimbra is the third city with the highest number of nationalmonuments in Portugal, but the average stay of visitors in the municipality of Coimbra is much lower than the average stay of visitors in Portugal. The aims of this paper are: to identify a set of components of the destination, perceived by visitors,and that confer competitiveness to urban destinations; to evaluate the positioning of the city of Coimbra in relation toother Portuguese cities that visitors consider to be the main competitors of Coimbra.
