218 COMPETITION LAW IN TOURISM (CMC) inTourism, an exploratory framework of competitiveness of international tourism advanced, reasoned the incorporation of five tourism‐specific sub‐ factors including substitutes, entry/exit barriers, organisation design, technology and value to the CMC that is specifically applicable to many destinations. They particularly emphasised that service quality should be independent of price, not related to it. Indeed, the value perceived by customers in the hospitality setting “combines elements of both price and a customer’s expectations for a service experience”.Their proposed destination competitiveness model further pinpoints potential problems or opportunity areas for the destination market and offers insight for further destination competitiveness research. The eight indicators presented in index form show the level of performance of each country relative to other countries5. More, they include price, openness in (international) trade, technology, infrastructure, human tourism (i.e., the achievement of human development in terms of tourism activity) and social development in the quality of life in the society, environment and human resources. The social and technology indicators have the most significant weight, while, surprisingly, human tourism and environment indicators have the least. The environmental indicator is of particular importance to tourism, especially when the growth of eco‐tourism is the main concern in a destination. Price had a significant inverse relationship with competitiveness: developed countries tend to be more competitive in terms of the other indicators and less competitive in terms of price. Gooroochurn and Sugiyarto argued that each indicator is far from exhaustive. 2. E-COMMERCE, PARITY CLAUSE & UNFAIR COMPETITION Price parity clauses, also referred to as retail most-favoured nation clauses, have recently triggered several antitrust investigations, almost all of them in markets involving intermediation platforms and agency business models (i.e. where suppliers keep control on final prices). Such clauses are frequently imposed to suppliers by intermediation platforms, each platform attempting to guarantee the best available price for a given product to its final consumers. Price parity clauses were considered approximately five years ago during the investigations against Apple and leading publishers in Europe and the U.S., 5 See Gooroochurn & Sugiyarto, 2005. Competitiveness indicators in the travel and tourism industry. Tourism Economics, 11(1): 25–43.
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