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文献出处：Sellers R, Nicolau J L. Assessing performance in services: the travel agency industry [J]. The Service Industries Journal, 2009, 29(5): 653-667.

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The Assessing performance of Enterprise: The Case of travel agency

industry

Sellers；Nicolau

Abstract

The aim of this article is to compare different approaches to the evaluation of economic performance in tourism. For the first time in tourism, this article simultaneously applies traditional productivity measures as well as parametric and non-parametric techniques to estimate efficiency and compares the results obtained. The empirical application is carried out on a sample of 567 travel agencies operating in Spain in 2004. The results reveal important differences depending on the methodology employed. Overall, none of the methodologies can be said to be better than the rest. These results highlight the importance of considering different approaches when evaluating performance in tourism.

Keywords: firm performance; profitability; productivity; efficiency; travel agencies

Introduction

The assessment of performance is a critical component of the management process in any type of organisation. Business performance is recognised as a multi-dimensional construct, as it covers diverse purposes and types of organisations/levels (Lewin & Minton, 1986). The single output to input ratios, such as return on investment (ROI) and

return on sales (ROS) may be used as indices to characterise financial performance. However, conventional referents of performance, whether they are measures of profitability, such as ROI, or productivity,

‘’are unsatisfactory discriminants of excellence

(Chakravarthy,1986),

as a company's performance is a complex phenomenon requiring more than a single criterion to characterise it (Zhu, 2000).

Furthermore, growing competitiveness and the globalisation of markets in recent years have given rise to an economic environment where it is becoming increasingly difficult for companies to survive. In this context, efficiency and productivity have become important issues for managers, both in the manufacturing and service sectors, as the analyses of these can be useful to evaluate firm performance. However, although the service sector's size and importance has grown in the past 20 years, productivity have not grown as fast in the service sector as in the manufacturing sector (Van Biema & Greenwald, 1997).

Particularly, this article analyses the tourism sector, given the importance that tourism has in the service industry. In the tourism sector, travel agencies are of course mindful of the need to manage the productivity and the efficiency of their business. However, the larger publicly quoted travel agencies tend to avoid aggregate economic approaches to the measurement of productivity in favor of firm level financial or operating measures that are meaningful to investors and stakeholders. While smaller and unquoted travel agencies have fewer stakeholders to convince, they similarly rely upon a relatively common set of operating and performance ratios (Reynolds, Howard, Dragun, Rosewell, & Ormerod,2005).

This article reviews some of the methods proposed to estimate economic performance in tourism. The methodology applied is based on traditional profitability and productivity measures as well as parametric

and non-parametric techniques to evaluate efficiency. The empirical application is carried out on a sample of 567 travel agencies operating in the Spanish tourist distribution sector in 2004.

The remainder of the article is organised as follows. The second section reviews the previous literature in this field. The third describes the methodology and sample used. In the fourth section, the results obtained are shown. Finally, the conclusions of the study, the limitations of the paper and future research possibilities are presented in the fifth section.

Literature review

To evaluate performance in tourism, several approaches have been proposed. Among these proposals, productivity and efficiency analyses have become very important in recent years. However, although the terms productivity and efficiency have been used interchangeably, this is unfortunate because they are not exactly the same thing. The most common interpretation in marketing and economics is expressed by Bucklin (1978) and Ingene (1982), who state that: The ratio of total productivity is the quotient of all outputs to all inputs. The ratio of partial productivity is the quotient of all outputs to a single input

’.

‘In this sense, productivity indexes are calculated by inserting numbers into predetermined formulas or ratios and do not take into account the performance of other retail outlets. As an alternative, relative efficiency is a new approach to the measurement of retail productivity, which focuses on an outlet relative to the best performers rather than the average performers as with the traditional absolute measures.

Studies of tourism efficiency analysis can be classified on the method employed. Most of them, use the data envelopment analysis (DEA) non-parametric method (Anderson, Fok, & Scott, 2000; Anderson, Lewis, & Parker, 1999a; Barros, 2005a, 2005b; Bell & Morey, 1995; Chiang, Tsai,