Although the tourist destination competitiveness (TDC) has been a hot topic among researchers, policymakers and practitioners in tourism industry at home and abroad in recent years, systematic studies on the quantitive evaluation have been still relatively rare. The purpose of this paper is to probe into the models, the selected variables, application, advantages and limitation, as well as the future study of the competitiveness evaluation by reviewing the relevant published theoretical and empirical studies. TDC is generally conceptualized both from the sustainable development of the destination and from the satisfaction of the tourist preference. However, TDC is a complex and a multidimensional concept encompassing various elements. Meanwhile TDC is also a relative concept and its measure depends on the choice of the different benchmarking.
The main theoretical bases of TDC are comparative advantage theory and competitive advantage theory. Price, arrivals and receipts, tourist demand and preference, as well as environmental management are the variables that are mostly applied in the evaluation models. The famous Crouch & Ritchie comprehensive model of TDC is introduced and compared with Dwyer & Kim integrated model. The former has been applied to empirical studies while the latter is mainly based on and developed from the former and needs to testify with the further research.Two types of data, published data and survey data, are used in the empirical studies. Finally, the main issues for further research are discussed.