Data envelopment analysis

This article applies Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to the field of travel and tourism. DEA has become a popular technique for measuring and evaluating performance. It has been successfully applied for the evaluation of efficiencies and the identification of benchmarking partners in situations where multiple inputs and outputs occur. The variety of applications clearly shows the wide appeal of DEA. However, although efficient frontier methods have been used extensively in the past, it has been just recently that tourism researchers have discovered DEA for examining efficiency in their industry.