Benchmarking National Tourism Organisations and Agencies: Understanding Best Practice

Citation

Holmes, K. (2007), "Benchmarking National Tourism Organisations and Agencies: Understanding Best Practice", Benchmarking: An International Journal, Vol. 14 No. 4, pp. 544-546. https://doi.org/10.1108/14635770710761915

Benchmarking National Tourism Organisations and Agencies provides a useful introduction to the role of national governments in tourism policy and development. This comes at a time when many governments are seeking to withdraw their intervention in tourism development, yet increase their border regulations, which inevitably impact on international tourist arrivals. The book begins by introducing the type of benchmarking used throughout the text and then provides a comparison on various tourism statistics, such as number of international arrivals and main purpose of travel, across several countries including the UK. Next the role of National Tourism Organisations (NTOs) is reviewed, noting international trends away from interventionism and towards partnerships with other agencies and parts of the tourist industry, particularly the commercial sector. The main body of the book follows, presenting a series of eight country‐by‐country case studies, each following the same format so that comparisons can be made. Lastly, there is a brief conclusion examining the lessons that can be drawn from this benchmarking exercise.

There is a fairly wide audience for this text. The case study chapters will be particularly interesting to tourism students, proving them with a clear overview of the different roles that national and regional governments can play in tourism development and regulation. The national studies will also offer them plenty of material for assignments and projects based around specific destinations. The book is also likely to be of keen interest to tourism researchers, providing them with an overview of how tourism operates within each of the case study countries. This may also be of interest to policy‐makers, working within local and regional agencies, not least as it offers alternative models for how government at different levels can work with other parts of the tourism industry.

The value of this text is largely in that hardly any tourism literature deals with the role of government, or indeed the public sector, within tourism development beyond a very basic summary. The few exceptions to this include Hall and Jenkins (1995), which is now getting out of date and a number of texts of tourism planning and policy, which include chapters on the role of government, for example Dredge and Jenkins (2007), which includes a chapter on the changing role of Australia's national and regional government in tourism policy and planning. In addition, the national case studies provide a very interesting comparison of tourism policy and development across different destinations, for whom tourism is of varying importance to the economy. A further strength is each case study has a section at the end listing the lessons learnt from this. For example, the French NTO is quite unusual in that it is mostly funded by the private sector, with whom it has very strong partnerships.

The book is based on a project conducted by the authors for the UK's NTO, VisitBritain. As such the UK is not included among the case study chapters. Rather these are focused on countries that might be considered competitors for the UK for international tourists, including other English‐speaking destinations such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada and other European countries, notably France, Spain and the Netherlands. The US is also not included as a case study as the role of the NTO in the USA has been devolved to a state or regional level. Additionally, there are no examples from Asia, South America and only one from Africa. This means that the text may have limited relevance to some audiences.

The case studies provide a snapshot of the NTO at the time of the research. Like many other areas of government, the role of the NTO is constantly changing and tourism is a particularly volatile world market. This means that the material included in this book was already out of date by the time it went to press. The Australian NTO, for example, has been completely reorganised and rebranded. The authors acknowledge this weakness and claim that the text can offer no more than a snapshot of government tourism activity at one particular time. This does mean, however, that the case studies need to be read as models of practice within an NTO, rather than absolute summaries of each government's policy and practice within their national tourism industry. The regular tourism statistics collected by the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (www.unwto.org) show that tourism statistics can vary wildly from year to year, as international events such as major sporting competitions, extreme weather and terrorism have corresponding positive and negative impacts on specific destinations and world regions. In addition to the case studies, however, there is a useful country by country set of reports, websites and other reference material, which both researchers and students could use to follow up the examples provided and gain a more up to date picture of the NTO's activities.

Lastly, while this book claims to benchmark good practice within NTOs, there is no standard of good practice to actually benchmark against, although the concept of “typical” practice is referred to in Chapter 4, which explains the benchmarking process. The method of benchmarking used is to set out a list of activities and statistics, which are presented for each of the eight NTOs in turn, with a short case study at the end of each chapter on how the local office of the NTO functions within the UK The final chapter examining the lessons learnt from this benchmarking exercise focuses on combining the lessons from each case study in order to make general recommendations for good practice for NTOs. There is no reflection on the value of the actual process of benchmarking adopted so readers should be clear that the “best practice” referred to in the book's title refers to good practice within NTOs and not within benchmarking. There is also no evidence that the individual NTOs engage in any benchmarking practice themselves.

My overall assessment of this text is that while it offers little theoretical development in the practice of benchmarking, it does fill a useful gap within the literature on both tourism policy and development and governmental practice. It also provides a useful introduction to the tourism industry within the different case study countries. It is still a shame for my teaching, however, that the UK is not included among the case studies.