Benchmarking in tourism destinations; Keeping in mind the sustainable paradigm

Decisions taken within the framework of tourism management may have important impacts on the environment that may in turn trigger feedback effects on tourism responses. Environmental conscious practices of tourism management may be either reactive, e.g. responding to environmental regulations, or proactive, e.g. effective in order to be competitive with other tourist locations and to satisfy consumers' preferences. However, this is just one side of the coin. The tourism industry exerts several effects on the management of environmental resources, which often work in opposite directions. In addition to the positive impact due to the increased demand for high environmental standards, a negative impact derives from the anthropisation of natural areas, increased air (mainly due to increased traffic) and water pollution, abnormal production of waste, a higher number of arsons in the woods, etc. Although the relationship between tourism management and environmental quality is a topic requiring further investigation (but this is not the focus of this paper)4, it is however undeniable that a good notion of the performance in the management of both provides a better understanding of the sustainable efficiency of tourism locations. Developing tools for the evaluation of the performance of tourism activities not only in economic terms, but also from an environmental perspective, is of critical importance. In particular, in order to provide policy makers with guidelines to correct management inefficiencies and to promote positive effects from the competition between destinations, the use of performance indicators is fundamental. Finding ways to produce simple indicators summarising the different features which characterise a management strategy, is crucial to policy mechanisms. Indeed, as Hart emphasises, an indicator is "something that helps you to understand where you are, which way you are going and how far you are from where you want to be" (Hart, 1997, pp. 67-76). Though indicators have a growing resonance in politics, it is often easier to discuss them in theoretical terms than it is in practice. Difficulties arise in choosing good indicators for each feature we want to emphasise in the analysis, in aggregating them in a wrap-up index, and more importantly, in finding data, which in the case of tourism activities are often scarce and incomplete and available only for more recent years. Similarly, data concerning natural resources management have been collected only lately; this is even more true for data concerning environmental impacts of/on tourism activities, see e.g. Cammarota et al. (2001) and Miller (2001). The present paper discusses a methodology developed to perform tourism destination benchmarking within the broader perspective of sustainability and in order to overcome the difficulties discussed; for this purpose, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is applied. Indeed, DEA is a methodology, which has been developed and successfully applied in order to deal with multiple and non-commensurable input and output problems. The developed methodology is applied to the assessment of the relative efficiency of Italian Regions from a sustainable perspective. The tourism industry is a sector of fundamental importance for the Italian economy contributing 12.1 % to GDP in 2003 (World Travel & Tourism Council, date) and its relevance is undoubtedly growing considering that tourism flow has increased by 18.6% during the period 1990-1997.5 Further, 33.8% of tourists visit the coastal areas of Italy, with a resulting intense pressure on local ecosystems. The dataset is composed of 20 Regions. These have been chosen as the basic decision units for comparison, because they represent the main decision authority in managing tourism destination in terms of land use planning, business permit allocation, environmental management, other regulations and tourism advertising, nationally and internationally. One should also bear in mind that tourism in Italy is a matter of exclusive Regional competence since 2001 (art 117, Title V, of the Italian Constitution, modified by the law 3/2001). For each Region, the analysis takes into consideration a set of indicators (inputs and outputs) which are considered relevant when valuing the performance of a management strategy, from an economic as well as environmental perspective. The paper is organised as follows. In Sect. 1 a brief description of the DEA methodology is given, while in Sect. 2 the data set, the model developed and the performed analysis are described. Section 3 provides a description of the main results and Sect. 4 concludes.