Publication Details
Abstract
This article reports the results of an original expert survey (N = 53 respondents) designed to assess meso-level (intra-national, regional) tourism competitiveness within Uzbekistan. The survey instrument asked respondents to (1) rate the relative importance of four proposed components of a regional tourism competitiveness index, and (2) rate the comparative attractiveness of Uzbekistan's fourteen administrative regions across seven distinct tourism-type dimensions — ecological, historical-cultural, pilgrimage, agritourism, ethnographic, mountain-extreme, and recreational tourism — together with separate ratings of each region's attractiveness as a destination for domestic and for inbound (international) tourists. All ratings were collected on a five-point Likert scale. The derived weights for the four meso-level components cluster narrowly between 0.243 and 0.254, indicating that experts regard tourism resource potential, regional attractiveness, demand stability, and infrastructure development as comparably important rather than sharply differentiated. The composite ranking across the seven tourism-type dimensions places Samarkand region first (composite mean 4.40 of 5), followed by Tashkent region (3.98) and Kashkadarya region (3.89), while the Republic of Karakalpakstan and Sirdaryo region occupy the lowest two positions (3.17 each). A comparative analysis of dimension-level scores further reveals a structural distinction between ‘generalist’ regions that score consistently across all seven dimensions (notably Samarkand and Tashkent region) and ‘specialist’ regions whose competitiveness is concentrated in a narrow set of dimensions — Bukhara and Khorezm regions rank among the top three nationally in historical-cultural and pilgrimage tourism alone, despite ranking only sixth and seventh on the seven-dimension composite. A further comparison of domestic versus inbound destination-attractiveness ratings shows that the regions hosting Uzbekistan's UNESCO World Heritage corridor (Samarkand, Bukhara, Khorezm) and the capital (Tashkent city) are rated relatively more attractive to foreign visitors than to domestic tourists, whereas regions with stronger nature-, mountain-, and agritourism profiles are rated relatively more attractive to the domestic market. These regional findings are also discussed in relation to a companion macro-level (national) survey conducted by the author, in which Uzbekistan's pilgrimage tourism attractiveness was found to rank third of thirteen countries surveyed — the present study identifies Samarkand, Bukhara, and Khorezm as the specific regional sources of that national-level strength.