Abstract
This study analyzes Kazakhstan’s tourism competitiveness through a descriptive and comparative design, drawing on the WEF Travel and Tourism Development Index (TTDI), the World Bank Logistics Performance Index (LPI), and national and international strategic documents. Kazakhstan possesses relative advantages in transport infrastructure and natural resources compared to Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. However, it exhibits significant weaknesses in tourism service infrastructure, human resource development, and promotion. To address these weaknesses, the study proposes the “KAZTUR-4 Strategic Framework,” which recombines selected dimensions of Porter’s Diamond Model (1990), Dwyer and Kim’s Integrated Model (2003), and Ritchie and Crouch’s Destination Competitiveness Model (2003) through an explicit mapping procedure that links Kazakhstan’s empirically identified weaknesses to theoretical constructs. The framework comprises four components: transport infrastructure; human resources and educational development; tourism product diversification and infrastructure; and promotion and marketing. Demand conditions, destination management, sustainability, safety, and local welfare are treated as cross-cutting dimensions. Within the TTCI series, Kazakhstan moved from 93rd (2011) to 79th (2019); the 2021 TTDI rank of 66th belongs to a methodologically revised index and cannot be read as a continuation of this trajectory. Tourism’s GDP contribution stood at only 0.8% in 2019, and the average length of stay was 2.6 nights—the lowest in the region. Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan moved more decisively on visa liberalization, as reflected in their TTDI 2021 International Openness scores (78.4 and 82.1 vs. Kazakhstan’s 42.5). Uzbekistan also outperformed Kazakhstan on Prioritization and Promotion (52.1 vs. 48.2).