Current Situation and Prospects of Studies on the Evaluation of Tourist Destination Marketing Performance.

With strict scrutiny on public sector funding of the tourism sector and increasingly fierce competition between tourism destinations, DMOs' expenditure on marketing activities has been subject to recent debate and the question of effectiveness has become a key issue. In terms of evaluating whether and how the marketing works to affect visitor behavior, performance evaluation of tourist destination marketing has become an inevitable requirement for the development of practice. But destination marketing performance evaluation is the most challenging problem in the area of destination marketing research because of the multi-source destination information and complex tourist decision-making process. The paper summarizes relevant studies domestically and overseas regarding performance evaluation of tourist destination marketing and concludes the researches from the concepts of destination marketing organization performance evaluation and Marcom performance evaluations. Through the review of these studies, the paper indicates that this field remains in its infancy. Though some progress has been made in the past few years, there is a lack of consistency in defining what metrics should be used to evaluate the destination marketing performance. And there hasn't got an acknowledged conceptual framework. At last, the paper provides the prospects for future research in the hope of providing references for domestic theoretical studies and practical activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]