Functional Benchmarking: Learning from best practices to improve service quality in medium and small hotels.

Awards or grades give customers self-assurance and at the same time present a yardstick of competitiveness within the location area

Literature review

The literature review focuses on exploring the potential of benchmarking to facilitate learning . It signifies the critical performance areas in classification and grading schemes in small to medium hotels . In the following part it specifies how people benefit from the stated grading schemes and how benchmarking is a useful grading scheme for hotel managers

Tourist destinations : components of attractiveness

Mill and Morrison (1992 ) make a note that

tourist destinations are made of attractions , facilities , infrastructure , transportation and hospitality . Laws (1995 ) spots chief essentials contributing to the attractiveness of a tourist destination as being climate , ecology culture and traditional architecture and less important rudiments specifically for tourist groups , e .g . hotels , catering , transport and entertainment . Goodall and Bergsma (1990 ) consider constituent , in addition to attractions , facilities /services accessibility and image . Destination choice , image and pleasure have all been the center of extensive tourism research (McLellan and Fousher 1983 Pyo et al , 1989 Selby and Morgan , 1996 Sirakaya et al 1996 .The subsequent inventory demonstrates components of tourist destination attractiveness , amassed from these sources , which were literature reviews concerning tourist destination choice , image and tourist satisfaction

Attractions Scenery /natural resources Climate Culture Food History Ethnicity and Accessibility

Facilities and services Accommodation Airports bus /train stations Sport facilities Entertainment Shopping centers and Food and beverage facilities

Infrastructure Water systems Communication networks Health care Power sources Sewage /drainage areas Streets /highways and Security systems

Hospitality Friendliness Helpfulness and Responsiveness to complaints

Cost Value for money Accommodation prices Food and beverage prices Transportation prices and Shopping prices

Directly or indirectly , small businesses participate in an dynamic role in granting roughly all the physical and intangible components of attractiveness acknowledged in the lists shown...