Sustainable Hotel Competitiveness Through Benchmarking an Application of the Marketing Mix 12P

Market research is critically important to the development of the hotel industry, as it helps to achieve compliance with international standards and increase the competitiveness of companies in the market. Benchmarking is a strategic process where companies compare their performance, practices, experience, and results with industry leaders and major competitors to identify flaws and find ways to fix and solve them. Benchmarking gives hotels opportunities to study international standards and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of their services. This paper presents both theoretical and practical results of using marketing mix 12P in hotel business; possibilities of using marketing mix 12P are substantiated and coefficients of index weights are revealed. The results of expert research have established the weightiest marketing mix element and developed a model that can be practically used by managers to determine competitiveness in the hotel business. The conclusion of the paper substantiates the advantages of using the benchmarking model, which will simplify the timely detection of problems in the Georgian hotel business and the ways to solve them. In the condition of benchmarking, the use of the marketing mix 12P will help to satisfy the customer demands, which will depend on the properly implementation of benchmarking in the hotel business. Keywords: Benchmarking, hotel business, marketing mix, 12P, expert assessment, marketing, research, model.