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While the main benefits of rural tourism have been studied extensively, most of these studies have focused on the development of sustainable rural tourism. The role of tourism contributions to rural community development remains unexplored. Little is known about what tourism contribution dimensions are available for policy-makers and how these dimensions affect rural tourism contributions. Without a clear picture and indication of what benefits rural tourism can provide for rural communities, policy-makers might not invest limited resources in such projects. The objectives of this study are threefold. First, we outline a rural tourism contribution model that policy-makers can use to support tourism-based rural community development. Second, we address several methodological limitations that undermine current sustainability model development and recommend feasible methodological solutions. Third, we propose a six-step theoretical procedure as a guideline for constructing a valid contribution model. We find four primary attributes of rural tourism contributions to rural community development; economic, sociocultural, environmental, and leisure and educational, and 32 subattributes. Ultimately, we confirm that economic benefits are the most significant contribution. Our findings have several practical and methodological implications and could be used as policy-making guidelines for rural community development.

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Using pillars and sub-index from the Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Index (T & TCI) to measure a destination’s competitiveness is popular. Still, its methodology underlying the calculation has been criticized. So the T&TCI Index has not been regarded as a reliable measure of a destination’s competitiveness. In this regard, this paper sought to set out a country-based tourism competitiveness evaluation model with various statistical methods to indicate how important tourism policy development has to design. We used data from an expert survey to examine the attributes and sub-attributes and shape the decision-making. We addressed a theoretical six-step procedure to ensure the evaluation model’s rigor in the model development context. The first was to do data collection. The second was to examine construct underrepresentation. The third was to examine common method bias. The fourth was to examine construct-irrelevant variances. The fifth was to evaluate intergroup consistency. And the sixth was to develop attribute weight. Our study showed that a country-based tourism competitiveness evaluation model encompassed 8 attributes and 28 sub-attributes. We identified cultural uniqueness, ecology and the environment as the two most important attributes. In the end, we addressed the practical contributions of this study and methods to policy-makers and researchers.