Voluntary
Initiatives for Sustainability in Tourism
VISIT
News
ITEM 5 - TOURBENCH project comes to an end
A number
of the VISIT ecolabels have been involved in a very innovative
project to develop a common
approach to monitoring and benchmarking in ecolabels.
This project called tourbench is now complete and
the lessons learned from the various efforts to gain
useful data from tourism businesses are being collated.
The GTBS one of the largest ecolabels in Visit has
nearly completed their evaluation of the successes
and lessons learned and these are highlighted below:
1. Tourism is a broad industry and benchmarking efforts
should be confined to a small user group and establish
a useful tool for this subsector rather than a generic
tool for all tourism businesses.
2. Most businesses will only undertake benchmarking
if the system is able to produce rapid results which
are transparent and easily understood
3. There is a general suspiscion with providing sensitive
commercial data to an organisation which is not known
to the business
4. There is a growing reluctance to provide data
onto an online system in case it results in follow
up spam emails
5. There is a lack of confidence and patience in
systems which may ask irrelevent questions in relation
to the businesses activities.
6. A unified approach is difficult to establish across
a rapidly evolving tourism marketplace with its own
specific characteristics dependent on the destination.
7. Benchmarking as a tool has a great deal to offer
tourism businesses provided it closely meets their
specific business footprint.
Overall the project has
been an interesting development which has allowed the
GTBS to trial a number of different
data gathering and benchmaking methods in order to
better define the needs and goals of benchmarking
in tourism businesses. Our experience also demonstrated
the need to focus benchmarking on simpler and more
specific goals tied to particular tourism industries
such as small guest houses in the UK rather than
the larger goals such as the campsite activities
which representted only a small part of the GTBS
certification scheme.
The final report for the project
as a whole is being completed by Syncera leisure and
they are collating
all the results from the online system together with
details provided by the different partners. When
this is available we will publish this on the VISIT21.net
website.
