Most tourism research is centred in the world's top tourism destinations. The present study focuses on the interactions between tourism and economic variables in twenty emerging markets. First, we provide a descriptive analysis and we rank the countries according to their percentage average annual growth in relation to a set of economic and tourism indicators during the last decade. By means of categorical principal component analysis we synthesize all the information of the rankings into two components: growth in the contribution of tourism to economic activity, and growth in hotel accommodation. Finally, we project all twenty destinations in a two-dimensional perceptual map. We obtain four clusters of destinations: Mali and Madagascar, with the top positions in terms of growth of the economic contribution of tourism; on the other extreme, Jamaica, Cyprus, Croatia, Portugal and Ireland, which are the more mature markets; Botswana, Bulgaria, and New Zealand, with the top positions regarding the growth in hotel accommodation; and in the opposite situation, the Republic of Moldova, which in spite of a moderate growth in hotel accommodation, has experienced a high increase in the contribution of tourism to economic activity. These results aim to shed light on the relative positioning of emerging destinations with respect to their potential competitors.