Destination benchmarking : An indicator-system’s potential for exploring guest satisfaction

• After giving an overview of latest benchmark approachesin tourism, an already existing Benchmarking Indicator Sys-tem implemented by the Austrian Government in 1987 is dis-cussed. This article first critically assesses the neglect of rel-evant elements covering the production and delivery processof tourism services in this approach. Hence, the existingbenchmarking approach is extended conceptually by linkingit to tourists’ satisfaction measures. There is growing evi-dence that tourism service quality attributes can fall intothree different categories of factors that display a differingimpact on tourist satisfaction. The literature distinguishesbetween two different approaches for best identifying thesefactors: Vavra’s two-dimensional Importance Grid, which isbased on customers’ self-stated importance and derivedimportance assessments, and Brandt’s Penalty-Reward-Contrastanalysis,which is based on the performance-only approachand thus only uses one (e.g., the satisfaction) variable. Thisarticle tests both approaches empirically using different setsof variables from a recent destination benchmarking survey

Nyckelord

destination benchmarking; three-factor struc- ture of tourist satisfaction; penalty-reward-contrast analysis

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