BY HELEN J. CATALBAS
THE TERM benchmarking has become a fashionable word since a few years back. When people leave their school, organization, place of work, or usual experience temporarily for certain destinations and for various reasons, we say they go benchmarking.
Some do benchmarking to locate, identify or discover certain measurements that will enable them to evaluate their own current state as individuals, groups, tourism destinations and organizations or business companies.
Certain groups use benchmarking discoveries to formulate their own action plans and determine how they should proceed progressively.
There are various kinds of benchmarking going on in our midst and around the world.
Among these kinds of benchmarking are in the nature of cultural, corporate, economic, organizational, lifestyle, tourism, best practices or what have you.
Tourism destination managers have to travel to other tourist destinations far and wide to do benchmarking activities, although some of these are actually junkets or paid vacations.
At any rate, benchmarks are used to compare or contrast tourism destinations with others within a similar category based on certain yardsticks.
Most common among tourism destinations is best practices benchmarking. So-called tourism managers use benchmarks in analyzing certain practices another destination is implementing. Sometimes copying what the others are doing happen as a result of benchmarking. Ironically, even the mistakes of another destination are copied and the result is disastrous altogether.
Would we rather be an original or a trying hard second rate copycat? (With due respect for a veteran movie actress who has gone to the Great Beyond)/PN
