ABSTRACT
Although some literature is available concerning the relevance of several benchmarking models to the tourism and hospitality industry (see Kozak 2004a and references therein), it is limited with respect to their relevance to fi nding a proper answer to the question of how destinations’ performance can be improved through the measurement of customer satisfaction. Moreover, one may see that past published academic works have paid little attention to building linkages between destination benchmarking and customer satisfaction and their relevance to tourism practitioners. Meanwhile, with their assumptions to make a comparison among multiple units or organizations, the majority fails to meet the basic conditions of a proper benchmarking investigation. Therefore, it is the intention of this chapter to focus upon expanding the fi eld of this relationship while making the benchmarking concept more worth being considered in the future’s conceptual and empirical studies and also keeping the attention of the related bodies (e.g. tourism authorities, practitioners etc.).
