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EUROPEAN BENCHMARKING TOOLS FOR SUSTAINABLE DESTINATIONS
Abstract
Tourist destination marketing started to gain considerable importance within tourism literature and practice during the last fifteen years. In this context, benchmarking became a key process for defining strategies and monitoring their implementation within tourist destinations. Several tools for destination benchmarking were developed at EU level. Due to the major importance of sustainability issues within all Tourism Policies adopted by the European Commission, great importance has been given to the creation of benchmarking tools for sustainable destinations. The paper advances the idea of developing a friendly ICT instrument to support the implementation of such European benchmarking tools in order to actively contribute to the sustainable development of more and more tourist destinations in Europe. Two qualitative research methods were used within the present paper: the literature review and innovation. The first part of the article synthesizes the information on tourist destination benchmarking, based on tourism literature review. A short presentation regarding the initiatives of the European Commission for the benchmarking of tourist destinations was included. The paper than focuses on the most recent benchmarking tool launched by the European Commission in 2010, the European Tourist Indicators System for Sustainable Destinations. Through comparison between this tool and the Dashboard of Sustainability, we advanced the idea of the necessity to develop the European Tourist Indicators System for Sustainable Destinations into an ICT instrument offering attractive visual representations for better implementation within European destinations.
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References15
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*** Dashboard of Sustainability, Web page available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashboard_of_Sustainability#cite_note-31, Accessed on the 27th of June 2015.
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