Benchmarking national tourism organizations and agencies: Understanding best practice

Abstract

The book comprises 13 chapters. The first chapter begins by introducing the concept of benchmarking and its substantial use in tourism. Chapter 2 overviews the current trends towards public–private sector partnerships in tourism marketing both at national and local levels. Chapter 3 tries to refresh our knowledge about how the selected countries have performed in international tourism over the last few years. Chapter 4 pays particular attention to the structure, legal status and the role of national tourism organisations (NTOs). Detailed country case studies are provided from Chapter 5 onwards. The structure of these chapters is based on the analysis of eight countries and the role of their NTOs. The included countries are Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, and Spain. Each chapter begins with an overview of tourism performance in each country, followed by the discussion of how the tourism industry is organised in each locality. It is also of interest to note that each chapter ends with a case study. Chapter 13, as the concluding chapter, presents a summary of the techniques and approaches adopted and key lessons learned through the application of benchmarking in tourism.