Managerial Judgment In City Benchmarking

Abstract

One of the weaknesses of past tourism benchmarking studies is treatment of all indicators as equally important, which is oftentimes a consequence of lack of data. Therefore, implications derived from such analyses may not be given a full attention by the affected stakeholders, as in real life situations, they are more likely to allocate a different weight on different objectives for their organizations/destinations. This is where the current study comes in: it delves into inspecting the impact of managerial judgment (i.e., weights) in city destination benchmarking by applying data envelopment analysis (DEA). A rather interesting finding is that the benchmarking partners are allocated based on the weighting of each objective. Thus, this clearly points toward the importance of taking the stakeholders’ judgment into account if aiming at a more complete interpretation of the efficiency scores—an area that is indisputably fully unexplored within the destination benchmarking domain to date.