Abstract Tourism competitiveness is distinguished from synthesized tourism strength. The former reflects the level of competitiveness in the near future comprehensively, while the latter is just the historical outcome of the tourism development, is a part of tourism competitiveness which has been actually represented. Therefore, provincial tourism competitiveness not only rests with actual competitiveness, but also is profoundly influenced by potential and sustaining competitiveness. The level of future provincial tourism competitiveness is greatly decided by the potential and sustaining competitiveness.The subsections are as follows:indexes of outstanding achievements constitute of actual competitiveness, including scale, rate and benefit competitiveness. Potential competitiveness is the operation of production factors which are divided into two grades:elementary ones and advanced ones. Sustaining competitiveness is the sustention of social and economic tourism environment and natural tourism environment.
There are two kinds of methods to do comprehensive evaluation, one being subjective judgment, and the other objective analysis, both of which have their limits:the former is subject to subjective judgment while the latter, dependent slantingly on objective data, is deficient in the analysis and solution of actual problems, thus not completely reliable in actual operation. Considering the anfractuous factors that influence provincial tourism competitiveness, this paper sets out to analyze the method of AHP(analytic hierarchy process) to give weights to indexes in tourism evaluation. It has two merits:first, this method, with the employment of the technique of delaminating analysis, can improve the systematic quality; second, it gives a uniform test to in dexes of each layer, and thus can avoid great subjective errors while preserving the experts' opinions. Besides, this paper uses the software of SPSS to make a clustering analysis of the classification of the provincial tourism competitiveness types in China.
2006, Vol. 21 
