A critical appraisal of the governance indicators of the DTI methodology using IRT models: an application to destinations of Caceres and Badajoz.

STD model is a project promoted by the Spanish Secretary of State for Tourism and managed by the Sociedad Mercantil Estatal para la Gestión de la Innovación y las Tecnologías Turísticas (Segittur) whose objective is to convert Spanish tourist destinations into Smart Tourism Destinations (STD). To this end, the STD methodology has been implemented, which is based on five fundamental pillars: governance, innovation, technology, sustainability and accessibility. This paper focuses on the first of these five pillars: governance. To measure governance, Segittur has developed a set of indicators included in the UNE 178502 standard of January 2022. Based on this proposal of indicators, the authors have developed a set of 15 tourism governance indicators, which have been measured in the 28 territories into which the whole of Extremadura can be divided (24 Local Action Groups and 4 cities). From the data obtained, the Item Response Theory was used to estimate the two-parameter model (2PL). The estimates of the parameters of this model have not only made it possible to characterise each indicator in terms of its difficulty and discrimination parameters, but also to establish a latent scale of tourism governance on which the 28 territories analysed have been positioned. The study leads to the conclusion that not all indicators are equally important in the measurement of tourism governance, and that tourist destinations interested in making effective progress in terms of tourism intelligence should focus their strategy on the fulfilment of certain governance objectives and leave the achievement of other less effective governance objectives in terms of improving tourism intelligence in the second term.