Tourism Destination Benchmarking: Evaluation and Selection of the Benchmarking Partners
Luštický Martin, Kincl Tomáš
Keywords:
benchmarking, evaluation, tourism, strategic planning
Abstract:
Tourism development has an irreplaceable role in regional policy of almost all countries. This
is due to its undeniable benefits for the local population with regards to the economic, social
and environmental sphere. Tourist destinations compete for visitors at tourism market and
subsequently get into a relatively sharp competitive struggle. The main goal of regional governments
and destination management institutions is to succeed in this struggle by increasing the
competitiveness of their destination. The quality of strategic planning and final strategies is a
key factor of competitiveness. Even though the tourism sector is not the typical field where the
benchmarking methods are widely used, such approaches could be successfully applied. The
paper focuses on key phases of the benchmarking process which lies in the search for suitable
referencing partners. The partners are consequently selected to meet general requirements to
ensure the quality if strategies. Following from this, some specific characteristics are developed
according to the SMART approach. The paper tests this procedure with an expert evaluation
of eight selected regional tourism strategies of regions in the Czech Republic, Slovakia
and Great Britain. In this way it validates the selected criteria in the frame of the international
environment. Hence, it makes it possible to find strengths and weaknesses of selected strategies
and at the same time facilitates the discovery of suitable benchmarking partners.
Fulltext download:
 Tourism Destination Benchmarking: Evaluation and Selection of the Benchmarking Partners [PDF file] [Filesize: 1 MB]
 10.7441/joc.2012.01.08
Luštický, M., Kincl, T. (2012). Tourism Destination Benchmarking: Evaluation
and Selection of the Benchmarking Partners. Journal of Competitiveness, 4 (1), 99-116. https://doi.org/10.7441/joc.2012.01.08
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