A Multi-Criteria Classification Approach for Identifying Favourable Climates for Tourism

The aim of this paper is to present a multi‐criteria classification approach for identifying world climates that are favourable to light tourism. We use a multi‐criteria aggregation method, Electre Tri‐nC, to assign over 60 000 world locations to one of four climate categories ranging from unfavourable to ideal. The motivations behind this work are to remedy to some of the methodological problems in composite indices such as the Tourism Climatic Index, where a weighted sum is computed using ordinal data. We present our results for the summer month of August on the basis of the years 1961–1990 derived from the CRU CL 1.0 climate database of New et al. (1999). In addition to being theoretically sound, our approach uses the original, virtually untransformed, continuous data thereby avoiding loss of information. It also minimizes the compensation effects and makes it possible to take into account additional criteria to cater to various tourism contexts with various decision maker profiles.