Benchmarking in Tourism and Hospitality Industries The Selection of Benchmarking Partners

This book provides a detailed description of different performance measurement methods in the context of the tourism and hospitality industry. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction to the principal concept of benchmarking and why it became so popular within the industry. Chapter 2 consists of a comprehensive description of studies on the practice of benchmarking in the tourism and hospitality industry. Chapter 3 deals with theoretical issues related to the measurement of business performance. Chapter 4 presents analytical techniques for estimating the unknown production function, basically classified as central tendency and frontier methods. Chapter 5 introduces the database (the Austrian Hotel and Restaurant Panel, 1991-97) used in the subsequent experimental studies and elaborates on existing performance studies in tourism research. Chapter 6 focuses on the application of mixture regression models as a central tendency's approach for the selection of optimal comparison partners. It includes an illustrative case example for the Austrian hotel and restaurant database. Chapter 7 discusses the data envelopment analysis (DEA) models and illustrates these using numerical examples. Chapter 8 introduces evolutionary data envelopment analysis, a completely new optimization technique for DEA problems to overcome at least some of DEA's main restrictions. Chapter 9 discusses developments and issues that are relevant for the future of benchmarking decision support systems and summarizes the most important research questions surrounding them. The book has a subject index.