Tourism management: analysis, behaviour and strategy.

Chapter 22 (Page no: 378)

Evaluating tourism management programmes: advancing a paradigm shift for achieving highly effective tourism destination management programmes and strategy performance audits.

This chapter focuses on the tourism management programme evaluation practices by government auditing agencies. The national governments of several countries have audit agencies that conduct both financial and performance audits of other government departments charged with providing services and causing desired programme performance outcomes; all 50 state governments in the USA have audit agencies that do both categories of audits (i.e. financial and performance audits). Woodside and Sakai's (2003) in-depth reviews of eight tourism management programme evaluation audits by seven government agencies offer two key disappointing conclusions. First, the majority of these audits result in highly negative performance assessments. Second, although these audits are more useful than none at all, most of these audit reports are inadequate shallow assessments - these audits are too limited in the issues examined; not grounded well in relevant evaluation theory and research practice; and fail to include recommendations that, if implemented, would result in substantial increases in performance. The present chapter describes the continuing (covering several years over three decades) consistent reports of poor tourism management performance for one US state government's tourism management programme as well as the continuing lack of rigorous auditing practice by the auditing agency for the same state government. The chapter calls for embracing a paradigm shift both by state government departments responsible for managing the state's tourism marketing programmes and by the state's auditing agency in conducting future management performance audits. The call applies for all government departments responsible for managing and auditing tourism marketing programmes.

>>
>> Return to Search Results