Tourism Sustainability Through Destination Benchmarking Indicator Systems: The Case of Alpine Tourism

Abstract

This paper begins by describing typical resource and sustainability issues provoked by the small and medium-sized tourism enterprise structure in European mountain areas. It suggests that because of the labour intensive character of tourism, sustained competitive gains for alpine businesses and their communities can be obtained by focusing management energies on improving the productivity of local tourism service production processes or value chains. Thus, the management of tourism services produced along a destination value chain may be seen from two viewpoints:. The paper suggests that core destination management activities should involve the regular benchmarking of visitor satisfaction as well as of effective resource stewardship. In turn, management in sustainable destinations should focus on its efforts on improving the quality perceived by the customer, whilst making the corresponding conversion of inputs into outputs more efficiently. The paper proposes an indicator system, a tool for benchmarking alpine tourism destination efficiency in both quantitative and qualitative ways. Using an European Alps case study, it demonstrates the applicability of the Data Envelopment Analysis as a method for combining several key destination productivity factors into one comprehensive productivity index.