Survey-Based Hotel Competitiveness Assessment Using an Integral Index in Uzbekistan

General Background: Hotel competitiveness is a critical component of tourism destination performance, particularly in rapidly expanding accommodation sectors. Specific Background: Uzbekistan has experienced substantial growth in accommodation capacity, creating a need for practical approaches to evaluate competitiveness among individual hotels. Knowledge Gap: Existing macro-level tourism competitiveness indicators do not adequately capture firm-level performance differences across hotels. Aims: This study aims to develop and demonstrate a survey-based competitiveness assessment framework by integrating hotel performance indicators into a benchmark-normalized integral index. Results: A structured questionnaire covering financial performance, service quality, market position, innovation, and human resources was mapped into four competitiveness criteria: market share, occupancy rate, customer satisfaction, and human-capital share. Using data from an illustrative sample of eight hotels across Samarkand, Bukhara, Tashkent, and Khiva, the integral-index approach revealed that competitiveness is more strongly associated with balanced performance across multiple dimensions than with dominance in a single indicator. Hotels with strong occupancy and customer satisfaction scores achieved higher rankings even when operating in lower-demand regions or possessing smaller market shares. Novelty: The study introduces a survey-based benchmarking framework that combines normalized performance indicators with a weighted integral-index methodology for hotel competitiveness assessment. Implications: The proposed approach provides regional tourism boards and hotel managers with a transparent and replicable tool for competitiveness benchmarking while supporting more informed managerial and policy decision-making through structured performance evaluation. Highlights: • Competitiveness rankings were generated using benchmark-normalized market, occupancy, satisfaction, and human-capital indicators.• Balanced performance across multiple dimensions produced stronger scores than superiority in a single criterion.• Hotels operating in lower-demand destinations achieved high rankings through strong occupancy and customer satisfaction outcomes. Keywords: Hotel Competitiveness, Survey Method, Benchmarking, Integral Index, Uzbekistan

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