Internal benchmarking for regional tourism organizations: A case example

During the past 20 years destination management has changed substantially towards more professionalism and goal orientation. Organizations such as the OECD and WTO as well as academia contributed with developing frameworks for assessing competitiveness and applying benchmarking processes at national and regional levels. However, continuous and systematic benchmarking for destination management has not been applied on a wider scale. This article reports on the development of an internal monitoring and benchmarking tool for a European destination at NUTS-III level that aims at overcoming prevailing weaknesses of existing instruments (e.g., lack of data, bias towards overnight tourism, limited involvement of appropriate stakeholders). The current system, called Tourism Sensor®, was set up in 2010 and repeated 2 years later. Results show, as expected, changes particularly where strategy implementation steps have been taken. Ratios also highlight sensitive areas where internal tourism management activities should be channeled in the near future.