Abstract
Slovak spa services are not given sufficient attention directly following the support and sustainable development. The paper focuses on the evaluation of the overall development and current level of efficiency of the Slovak spas in 2013–2018, through the application of DEA models. Input variables (total number of beds, employees, medical staff) and output variables (use of bed capacity, number of treated clients) within the structure of DEA models analyzed (CCR-I, CCR-O, BCC-I, BCC-O) are determined by results of the correlation analysis. The data were obtained from the annual reports of the spa enterprises. By the results, the average efficiency score for all enterprises reached 0.7527, i.e., the average spa enterprise would need only 75.27% of currently used inputs for a given output production to move to the efficiency frontier. The development of the average efficiency score confirmed a positive growing trend until 2015; however, the efficiency decreased by 1.84% in a year-to-year comparison in 2016–2018. In each year of the analyzed period, the number of inefficient enterprises (66.67%) exceeded that of the efficient ones (33.33%). Through research carried out in spa facilities, the authors contributed to expanding the application of the DEA method in another tourism sector.
Highlights
Due to changing global business environment, the issue of evaluating business efficiency is currently discussed more, not to mention the effort to develop new, modern approaches to its solution
Due to the fact that the data envelopment analysis (DEA) method is the subject of research of a huge number of research studies, this paper focuses on the studies carried out in areas related to spa treatment, as much as possible
The input-oriented DEA model with the assumption of variable returns from scale (BCC-I) is considered to be the starting point in the field of healthcare and hospitality, four variants of input and output-oriented DEA models were applied with the assumption of constant and variable returns from the scale–CCR-I, CCR-O, BCC-I, BCC-O, the most frequently used on the basis of the literature research
Summary
Due to changing global business environment, the issue of evaluating business efficiency is currently discussed more, not to mention the effort to develop new, modern approaches to its solution. Due to the development of statistical methods and the growing interest of financial institutions and the enterprises, there is a significant increase in the use of innovative methods and the models for evaluating business efficiency in various economic sectors, in the past decade. Spa tourism is one of the most popular forms of recreation in the modern world. In the last three decades, there has been a dynamic development of spa tourism and other forms of health tourism, such as wellness and medical tourism [2,3]. By the medium variant of the United Nations forecast calculated for the countries of the European Union, it is expected
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