Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
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Type of accommodation
for practical reasons, some countries restrict the concept of
domestic tourism to cover only those persons using commercial accommodation
facilities (after Latham and Edwards 2003:65-6).
Problems in applying WTO definitions may also reflect an individual country's reasons
for generating such statistics, which may not necessarily be to contribute to a better
understanding of statistics per se. For example, WTO (1981) identified four uses of
domestic tourism statistics:
• To calculate the contribution of tourism to the country's economy, whereby estimates of
tourism's value to the Gross Domestic Product is estimated due to the complexity of
identifying the scope of tourism's contribution.
• To assist in the marketing and promotion of tourism, where government-sponsored
tourism organisations seek to encourage its population to take domestic holidays rather
than to travel overseas (see Hall 1997a) for a discussion of this activity among Pacific
Rim countries).
• To aid the regional development policies of governments which harness tourism as a
tool for area development where domestic tourists in congested environments are
encouraged to travel to less developed areas and to improve the quality of tourism in
different environments.
• To achieve social objectives, where socially oriented tourism policies may be developed
for the underprivileged which requires a detailed understanding of the holiday-taking
habits of a country's nationals.
Regional and local tourist organisations also make use of such data to develop and market
destinations and different businesses within the tourism sector. But how is domestic
tourism measured?
Burkart and Medlik (1981) argue that two principal features need to be measured:
first, the volume, value and characteristics of tourism among the population of the
country; second, the same data relating to individual destinations within the country. The
WTO (1981, cited in Latham 1989) considers the minimum data requirements for the
collection of domestic tourism statistics in terms of arrivals and tourist nights in
accommodation classified by
• month
• type of grade of accommodation establishment
• location of the accommodation establishment and overall expenditure on domestic
tourism.
Latham and Edwards (2003) argue that it is possible to generate additional data from such
variables including length of stay, occupancy rate and average expenditure. Many
countries also collate supplementary information beyond the minimum standards
identified by WTO, where the socio-economic characteristics of tourists are identified,
together with their use of tourist transport and purpose of visit, though the cost of such
data collection does mean that the statistical basis of domestic tourism in many less
developed countries remains poor.
The methods used to generate domestic tourism statistics are normally based on the
estimates of volume, value and scale derived from sample surveys due to the cost of
