What if the main bottleneck to Tunisian tourism wasn’t price, nor climate, nor heritage, but the road that leads to them? The question is unsettling, because it shifts the debate from the room to the corridor, from what you offer to how people access it. Yet this is precisely the question posed, with numbers to back it, by the latest global ranking of the sector: a country whose value lies in its offering, and whose bottleneck lies elsewhere.
The numbers fit on a few lines. Tunisia ranks 82nd out of 110 economies with a score of 3.62 out of 7, exactly the same as in 2024, but four places lower. Yet it has not declined: it has largely stalled while 101 economies out of 110 progressed, at the fastest average pace since 2019. The retreat is a peloton effect, not a collapse.
These findings come from the IACE strategic note, published in 2026, which offers an interpretation of the Travel & Tourism Development Index 2026 from the World Economic Forum. A useful clarification before proceeding with the analysis: this index does not measure arrivals, nor revenues, nor visitors’ spending. It assesses the conditions that allow a sector to develop sustainably. It is therefore less a performance bulletin than an inspection of the plumbing.
A score of 2.2 out of 7 in a world that is growing at 7.2%.
The harshest issue concerns air transport. Tunisia scores 2.2 out of 7 here, compared with 3.83 on average in North Africa and 4.62 in the MENA region, a gap of 2.4 points with the latter. Meanwhile, the global score for this pillar rose by 7.2% between 2024 and 2026, with improvements in 92% of economies. Ground and port infrastructures do not fare much better, at 2.5, in a pillar whose global progression remained flat.
For a facility manager, the translation is simple: every missing link, every insufficient frequency, every laborious transfer is a customer your service quality will never have the chance to win over. The index does not establish a causal link with your occupancy rates, the note reminds. But it designates the area where fragility is most persistent.
The paradox of underutilized abundance
