Benchmarking to Improve the Strategic Planning Process in the Hotel Sector

Gaining the knowledge of a firm's relative position in key qualitative processes should be an essential objective of the strategic planning process. This article shows how the managerial technique of benchmarking can be used to go beyond traditional quantitative analysis and penetrate underlying qualitative processes. Benchmarking is used to assess the quality of four key strategic planning design parameters (formality, participation, sophistication and thoroughness) among 63 hotel units representing eight UK hotel groups. Results indicate that there is a significant gap between the quality of current planning processes with theoretical best practice.