PAST REPRESENTATIONS

Response of ATHE to Tourism Statistics Improvement Initiative (TSII) (2003)

ATHE assumes this is part of a bigger WTO initiative to standardise statistics across nations and ATHE confirms standardisation is a key point for academics, from both a teaching and research perspective. Students are endlessly tripped up by statistics from different countries (or even from the same country but from different years) which purport to indicate the same thing, but have actually been measured in quite different ways e.g. tourism revenue/spending, value of the tourism industry, contribution to GDP, tourism employment, multiplier effect data etc.

ATHE would wish to highlight the following issues:

• clear, reliable, up-to-date and comparable statistics across a consistent set of areas
• the means of measurement to be clearly expressed along with the data produced e.g. if we are giving statistics about incoming tourist to the UK, or about day trips, we need to have easy access to how these data were collected and which definitions we are using.
• some expression of the comparative accuracy/reliability of data should also be published – e.g. this is accurate to within =/- 5% or similar.
• the ability to compare between countries using the same measures and definitions would be ideal (as per WTO plans).
• better dissemination of data through key publications and via the web
• data to be able to make up TSAs for the UK and regionally
• colleagues involvement in the recent ‘Intelligence Review – a Ten Year Strategy For the SW’ sponsored by SW RDA conducted by The Tourism Company suggests this might be an exemplar for data management (Dorset New Forest Market Intelligence Project)
• the ability to disaggregate figures down to local levels and to sector levels. At present the figures can only provide national and occasionally regional pictures. This hardly provides a basis for knowing what is happening in tourism
• samples need to be big enough to allow confidence as well as disaggregation. The sizes are OK for the IPS data (although information is not collected for much disaggregation on the supply side) but the UKTS is based on very small samples which really do not permit much breakdown or analysis
• definitions used for international and domestic should follow the WTO definitions
• regular information on excursions (day-tripper) if we want to have a complete view of tourism