BENCHMARKING UTILIZATION IN REGIONAL PLANNING OF TOURISM DEVELOPMENT

Annotation The systematic promotion of tourism can be understood as a specific tool of regional policy. Tourism must be managed with respect to the long-term concept of sustainability to enable the regions to fully utilize their potential. Therefore, the regions make use of strategic planning to fulfil this aim. The fading economic crisis has been raised the increased importance of the quality of the regional planning process and its resulting strategies. One possibility for enhancing this quality is represented by the utilization of the benchmarking method. This paper drafts the worldwide procedure for evaluation of the regional development strategies which should be used as a tool for their comparison and identification of the best practices. This procedure is based on the wide-recognized rules of the quality management and managerial decision-making procedures. Its result is the set of requirements for strategies quality. It is elaborated into the concrete decision-making criteria for selection of the best examples of the regional planning.