Benchmarking tourist hotels performance for strategies development

Abstract

ABSTRACT The marked decrease in the number of mainland tourists visiting Taiwan may turn from a temporary phenomenon to a normalized one because of the potential harm it represents to the Taiwan tourism industry. The purpose of this study is to use hierarchical cluster analysis combined with entropy to derive clustering and to identify appropriate performers by measuring operational performance levels. These clusters may serve as the benchmarks for under-performing tourist hotels (classified into five groups according to the numbers of employees) to improve in response to the reduced number of Chinese tourists coming to Taiwan. This study provides a different insight into the tourist hotels industry in benchmarking comparable to previous research groups. The measurement of five criteria has been both statistically different and significant for the clusters in order to support a view that the clusters contain hotels with a similar numbers of employees while maintaining distinct performance profiles and developing strategies for improvement.