How much money is your business wasting? How good is the service you deliver? This pioneering book will familiarize you with benchmarking techniques that can be used to gauge and improve the performance of hospitality and tourism businesses anywhere! With compelling case studies drawn from hotel management, environmental systems, and destination practices, it examines important aspects of benchmarking, including satisfaction barometers, indicator development, and finding/networking with benchmarking partners. After an overview of benchmarking concepts and processes, this essential book explores: benchmarking's strengths and weaknesses ways to apply benchmarking to tourist facilities and destinations the role of customer satisfaction and loyalty in benchmarking--and a way to efficiently measure it a procedure for identifying benchmarking partners the Tyrolean Tourism Barometer--its value, its usefulness, and ways to improve it the changing functions of hotel front office operations and procedures and benchmarks that can help empower front office employees benchmarks in quality management benchmarks in accreditation for hospitality and tourism businesses a case study of environmental management systems for Caribbean resorts and hotels--how they have saved money on water, electricity, diesel fuel, and liquefied petroleum gas while improving environmental performance