RESULTS OF ASSESSMENT OF THE COMPETETIVENESS RANKING OF MONGOLIA ’ S TOURISM DESTINATION

The research study aimed to develop the tourism destination competitiveness model in the Mongolian case. Based on comparative analysis of the previously developed and applied models in other countries and regions, the author developed a basic model to evaluate the competitiveness of Mongolia’s tourist destinations. Mongolia’s 11 main tourism destinations were evaluated by the destination competitiveness model with 6 groups, and 11 categories. The Grey relational analysis was used to estimate the competitiveness ranking of Mongolia’s tourism destinations. The result of the research study showed that the Gobi, areas related to Chinggis Khan and Kharkhorin (or Karakorum) were the best destinations, in terms of competitiveness, and the Altai Tavan Bogd was listed as the least competitive destination in Mongolia.


INTRODUCTION
The success of tourism destinations in the world market is influenced by their relative competitiveness.Tourism destination competitiveness is becoming an area of growing interest amongst tourism researchers [1].The contention is that destination competitiveness has "… tremendous ramifications for the tourism industry and is therefore of considerable interest to practitioners and policy makers" [2].Condition of sustainable development of tourism will be created based on rational planning and destination management.The tourism industry has been paying increasingly more attention to issues of competitiveness and development of destination.Mongolia has been implementing comprehensive policies and regulations on ways to develop tourism in the country since the establishment of the national touristy industry.For example; the government formulated general policy for tourism development in 1995, "Master plan for developing national tourism in Mongolia" in 1999, the State Great Khural of Mongolia approved the Regional Development Concept and National Development of Mongolia, and Master plan for developing tourism in Mongolia until 2015.
According to the well-known tourism competitiveness researchers Ritchie and Crouch (2000), a destination's competitiveness is a country's ability to create added values and to increase the national wealth by managing assets and processes, attractiveness, aggressiveness and proximity, and thereby integrating these relationships within an economic and social model that takes into account a destination's natural capital and its preservations for future generations [3].
Regarding the concept, it needs to evaluate its competitiveness, to compare levels of these developments, to define the current situation of destination development in order to process the management, the planning and the policies for developing tourism in the region.On the other hand, resource and destination of tourism become the key factor for improving circulation of tourism [4].Therefore, the main factors for developing a sustainable or continuous tourism of Mongolia are the competitiveness, development and management of the destinations.
The tourism destinations of Mongolia are concentrated in only a few areas, which has been creating environmental and ecological degradation.The main reason is the absence of integrated policies and planning and consequently, the unavailability of fundamental research materials.In order to address this challenge, the current situation should be defined and the destination competitiveness needs to be evaluated as well.It is also important to develop and create fundamental research materials for formulating development policies of the sector and also developing destinations.The other important element includes the planning and its integration with the policies of other sectors.Evaluating the competitiveness of tourism destination and implementing the tourism development policies will make it possible for Mongolia to compete with other countries around the world.Thus, the development of appropriate methodological framework to evaluate Mongolia's tourism destinations' competitiveness is quite a challengingtask.The main goal of the research study: It aimed to develop appropriate methodology to evaluate the competitiveness ranking of tourism destinations in Mongolia.

Materials:
There are a number of different spatial concepts in tourism [5].It includes: -Permanent residence areas -Transit station -Travel to destination in terms of tourism, "zorikh gazar" is the DESTINATION.Clare Gunn, who is an American researcher, has given following definitions of destination [5]."Destination for tourists" is to be places focused services and exhibitions or attractions for spare time or recreation or entertainments of tourist".In developing their conceptual model of Tourism Destinatination Competitiveness (TDC), Crouch and Ritchie [1], build on Michael Porter's [6] well-known framework of the "Diamond Model of National Advantage".Competitiveness of tourism destination means to be more effective and command a benefit position in the tourism market [7].The ability of a destination to increase tourism expenditure, to attract increasingly many more numbers of visitors while providing them with a satisfying and memorable experience, and to do it in a profitable manner, while enhancing the well-being of the destination residents and preserving the natural capital of the destination for future generations [3].Despite of the approach under which the destination competitiveness is seen, defining its concept is not the only difficult task under this topic: measuring competitiveness is as or even more complex.Firstly, because competitiveness in general (of a firm, a country or a destination) is both a relative as well as a multi-dimensional concept.Secondly, because tourism is an industry which has a very particular nature, that involves the selling of "experiences" instead of tangible products, and which embraces different contexts, such as economic, social, political, etc.Because of these features, the evaluation of the competitiveness of tourism destinations becomes an multi-stakeholder process ensuing serious problems.Since there many tourism products, books and surveys created in recent years, some researchers or scientists have been studying the influence of this determinant and the competitiveness of tourism destination.Table 1 shows the influence of these determinants and the competitiveness of tourism destination.Based on a survey carried on the determinants and competitiveness of tourism destination, we have formulated a model of competitiveness of tourism destination in Mongolia (Figure 1).Based on the model, we have developed indicators (Table 2) for evaluation and assessment of the competitiveness of tourism destination in Mongolia.Specialists of the tourism sector have given expert assessment of the indicators and determinants of the model.

Event
To organize based on any specific measures, such as interestingly festival, culinary arts, festivals and shows reflected ethnographic features, mountains and traditional rituals, animal farming and events of nomadic cultures as well as artisans.
Other unique buildings and towers, sports stadiums, parks and famous Square, the central square, museums, etc. Approaches of quality in marketing, statistical business analysis and scientific cognitive analysis were used in the research work.Also, Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) was used to estimate the ranking of destinations' competitiveness.The GRA analysis is based on a synthetic measure on the similarity of developing trend to measure relationship between determinants.The GRA required a small amount of information and the ranking did not have certain statistical distribution, as such the calculation was simple and focused on determining the ranking order [17].There are five steps involved in the formation of grey correlation degree: Step 1: Find the maximum value and minimum value in the original sequence.Step 2: Generation of the grey correlation is followed by (a) larger-the-better model: the larger the desired objective the better, such as the index of total revenue in this paper:

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The competitiveness ranking of these 11 tourism destinations were made according to 6 groups and 24 sub-indicators, The data for each of the 24 sub-indicators of competitiveness, developed by the researcher, was compiled alongside corresponding ranks for each of the 5 levels of Grey relational analysis and finally the overall ranking of each indicator (Table 3) was calculated.For example, if the travel sights was ranked first, the point will be 11, but if it was ranked second, the point would be 10.
In addition to ranking, the following evaluation hierarchy was used to assess the overall competitiveness of the destination.
There are 6 indicators with 1-11 points and the minimum point is 6 and the maximum will be 66.In other words, evaluating competitiveness: -Competiveness is good 47-66 -Competiveness is satisfactory 27-46 -Competiveness is poor 6-26.When considered by 24 points, the highest level of competitiveness were Gobi, Chinggis Khan's home town and Kharkhorin.And the lowest level of competitiveness is Terkh, Otgontenger, Dornod aimag and Altai Tavan Bogd (Figure 2).Table 4 lists the top and bottom 3 in terms of overall competitiveness.These places were ranked in the following order as the result of the evaluation: Gobi, Chingis Khan's home town, Kharkhorin, Dariganga, Khuvsgul, Uvs Lake, Terelj, Terkh, Otgontenger, step of Dornod and Altai Tavan Bogd.Subsequently, following recommendations were developed to improve the competitiveness and tourism services at the destinations regarding the advantages and disadvantages of the competitiveness and other related factors: -At the first places, Gobi and Chingis Khan's home town have following advantages such as favourable environment and climatic conditions, good development of road and related infrastructure, various attractions and resources of tourism.However, areas that need attention are the stabilization of the price of service organizations at the Gobi destinations, increasing of the capacities and opportunities of service organizations at Chingis khan's home town -In Kharkhorin.They all havebetter opportunities for improved services and attractions for tourism, but there still is room for improvement in terms of price of service organizations and safety.Similarly, capacity of service organizations in the protected area of Dariganga, improved safety for tourists in Khuvsgul andbetter infrastructure and capacities of service organizations of tourism in Uvs lake area are important.Other challenges include the tackling of pollution of environment-nature sources and making more attractive various events being organized at the Gorkhi-Terelj National Park and the Khorgo-Terkhyn Tsagaan Lake.The above studies also revealed that the infrastructure, capacities of service organizations and their prices at strictly protected area of Otgontenger must be given priority.In addition to this, investment must be made innew service organizations and safety of tourists in the Dornod area, and likewise, there is a need to improve infrastructure, build up the capacities of service organizations and make their prices rational at the Altai Tavan Bogd National Park.

CONCLUSIONS
The result of the study led to the development of evaluation methodological model of tourism destination competitiveness in Mongolia.The evaluation model consists of six main indicators and 24 sub-indicators including such indicators as tourism attraction, weather and climate conditions, environmentnature, safety, price, accessibility of tourism destination etc.Based on the developed model, the evaluation ranking of the following eleven main tourism destinations in Mongolia, such as the Gorkhi-Terelj National Park, Khorgo-Terkhyn Tsagaan Lake National Park, Orkhon Valley National Park, Khuvsgul National Park, Khan Khentii Strictly protected area, Umnugovi aimag and Uvs lake, Otgontenger strictly protected area, Altai Tavan Bogd National Park, and protected areas of Dornod and Dariganga were made.Grey relational analysis was used in evaluating and assessing the tourism destination competitiveness.
According to the evaluation, the tourism destinations were ranked in the following order: the Gobi, the birthplace of Chinggis Khan, Kharkhorin, Dariganga, Huvsgul, Uvs Nuur, Terelj, Terkh, Otgontenger, Dornod, and Altai Tavan Bogd.The result of the ranking shows that there is a need to improve tourism competitiveness in each tourism destination.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Model of the Mongolian tourism destination competitivenessTable 2. Mongolian tourism destination competitiveness indicators № Theme Competitiveness indicator Definition

Table 1 .
Basic research of models destination competitiveness

Table 3 .
Result of ranking evaluation