Benchmarking the Asia Pacific tourism industry: A Bayesian combination of DEA and stochastic frontier

This study measures and compares the efficiency of leading tour operator and hotel companies across several Asia Pacific countries. We use an innovative methodology that is based on combining the stochastic frontier and data envelopment analysis in a Bayes framework. We show from the results that Australia, Singapore and South Korea are the most efficient in both their tour operator and hotel industries. We further show that international hotels in the region have a slightly higher efficiency than local hotels. We provide a listing of the most efficient tour operators and hotels in each country and discuss the implications of our findings.

► We model the efficiency of leading tour operators and hotels in the Asia Pacific region.
► We introduce a new methodology that combines DEA and SFA in a Bayes framework.
► We provide ranking of the most efficient countries.
► We find that international hotels are slightly more efficient than local hotels.