Conceptualizing Destination Performance Evaluation for Internal Destination Benchmarking: A Review

Abstract

Benchmarking  the  performance  of  tourism  in  a  tourist destination is an extremely complex and challenging task because  of  its  interdisciplinary  nature  and  due  to  the involvement of many sectors, components and elements. Integrating  the  different  sectors  and  synergizing  the tourism system function are major issues as the tourism industry  requires  different  levels  of  involvement  with diverse interests. Since tourism is one of the key areas of economic  transformation  in  developing  countries,  it  is essential to enhance destination image, positioning, and ultimately  to  achieve  market  leadership  which  can contribute significantly to communities and nations. It is important  to  evaluate  the  performance  of  the  tourist destination in order to stabilize the growth of tourism in the most competitive and sustainable manner. This study explains the construction of Index Core Components and performance  evaluation  methods  for  internal  tourist destination benchmarking using  literature reviews.  The findings  revealed  that  a new  conceptual  model  can  be used  by  incorporating  major  sectors,  components  and elements of tourism to measure individual performance of the selected Index Core Components.