oui stars Travel Intelligence | Permanent methodology | Version 2027
The official rules, indicators, weights, transformations, data-quality controls and sources behind the oui stars Travel Europe Tourism Investment Index 2027.
Eligibility
A country must belong to the approved universe, be an EU Member State in the European subset, have complete observations for all six indicators, be covered by the common Eurostat accommodation framework and require no imputation or restricted commercial data.
Eligible: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain and Sweden.
Dimensions, indicators and weights
| Dimension | Indicator | Definition | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Market attractiveness | International tourism receipts | 2024 balance-of-payments travel credits, current USD | 20% |
| Market attractiveness | Tourist-accommodation nights | Nights in all registered tourist accommodation, 2024 | 15% |
| Hospitality capacity and development | Accommodation bed places | Registered bed places, 2024 | 20% |
| Hospitality capacity and development | Realised capacity growth | CAGR in registered bed places, 2019–2024 | 15% |
| Investment environment | Regulatory Quality | World Bank WGI Regulatory Quality, 2024 | 20% |
| Economic stability | Inflation stability | Distance of 2024 CPI inflation from 2% | 10% |
Weights total 100%. No indicator exceeds 20%. Receipts measure international monetary demand; nights measure physical accommodation use; bed places measure supply; capacity CAGR measures realised supply development; regulation and inflation measure enabling conditions.
Normalisation and outliers
Receipts, nights and bed places are transformed using base-10 logarithms. Each indicator is then winsorised at the cohort’s 5th and 95th percentiles and rescaled to 0–100. Capacity growth and Regulatory Quality use the same percentile-capped min–max transformation without a logarithm.
Inflation stability is measured as the absolute distance between 2024 CPI inflation and 2%. Its normalisation is reversed, so observations closer to 2% receive higher scores. Winsorisation changes the score boundary, not the underlying source observation.
Small-country, missing-data and shock rules
- No per-capita tourism or accommodation ratios are used because very small resident denominators can create extreme values.
- Absolute scale measures are logarithmically transformed and capped at P95.
- No imputation, interpolation or regional-average substitution is allowed.
- All six observations are mandatory; otherwise the country is marked INSUFFICIENT DATA.
- Current-level observations older than three years are inadmissible. The 2019 value is used only as the fixed starting point of the five-year capacity CAGR.
- Current-USD receipts remain exposed to exchange rates, but their weight is capped at 20%, while physical indicators carry 50%.
Confidence and sensitivity
Confidence assesses rank robustness and comparability, not tourism quality. HIGH indicates a narrow rank range and no material special caveat; MEDIUM indicates moderate movement or a small-market caveat; LOW indicates a tested rank range of roughly eight or more positions or a material outlier.
| Test | Market | Hospitality | Regulation | Stability | Spearman correlation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Equal dimensions | 25% | 25% | 25% | 25% | 0.927 |
| Investment-led | 30% | 30% | 25% | 15% | 0.984 |
| Tourism-led | 40% | 40% | 15% | 5% | 0.982 |
Leave-one-dimension-out rank correlations are 0.819 without Market, 0.951 without Hospitality, 0.898 without Regulation and 0.984 without Stability.
Exclusions
Iceland lacked the required 2024 observation in the harmonised publication. The United Kingdom lacked a current post-Brexit series under the common framework. Norway and Switzerland were kept outside the mandatory EU reporting cohort. Montenegro, Serbia and Türkiye were not admitted without fully verified, scope-consistent 2019–2024 series.
International air connectivity was excluded because the open international passenger series measures activity by nationally registered carriers, not destination accessibility. More suitable ICAO network products are licensed.
Limitations
- National reporting thresholds for very small accommodation establishments are not perfectly identical.
- Some official 2019 capacity values are published in rounded thousands.
- Capacity CAGR is a proxy for realised registered supply development, not a hotel construction pipeline.
- Nights include residents and non-residents.
- Current-USD receipts contain FX and nominal-price effects.
- Open, harmonised data do not cover RevPAR, transaction yields, construction costs, land costs or financing spreads.
- The measure favours investable market scale and is not a tourism-intensity or sustainability index.
Authoritative source register
| Indicator | Authority and dataset | Access |
|---|---|---|
| International tourism receipts | UN Tourism World Tourism Barometer, November 2025; Eurostat bop_its6_det | Open or publicly accessible official source; attribution required where stated. |
| Nights spent | Eurostat tour_occ_ninat | Open or publicly accessible official source; attribution required where stated. |
| Bed places and capacity | Eurostat tour_cap_nat, 2024; Statistics Poland / Eurostat, 2019 | Open or publicly accessible official source; attribution required where stated. |
| Definitions | Eurostat tourism accommodation metadata; Eurostat balance-of-payments metadata | Open or publicly accessible official source; attribution required where stated. |
| Regulatory Quality | World Bank Worldwide Governance Indicators | Open or publicly accessible official source; attribution required where stated. |
| CPI inflation | World Bank consumer-price inflation | Open or publicly accessible official source; attribution required where stated. |
| Reuse terms | Eurostat copyright and reuse notice | Open or publicly accessible official source; attribution required where stated. |
| Aviation exclusion | World Bank / ICAO series metadata; ICAO Data+ licensing | Open or publicly accessible official source; attribution required where stated. |
Access and validation date: 6 September 2026. Research product of oui stars Travel Intelligence. Methodology version 2027.
