‘There should be science in tourism data-gathering’

The Business Mirror in the Philippines reports that the biggest international gathering of tourism leaders and stakeholders opened inconspicuously on Mactan Island  on Tuesday with a workshop aimed at creating a scientific and more credible system of gathering and interpreting statistics in the industry.

United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) secretary-general Franceso Frangialli said there is a need to come up with more systematic data in order for governments to appreciate the value of the tourism industry.

Speaking in front of over 200 deleagte form around 100 countries, Frangialli said credible tourism data would push the tourism agenda among national governments, as it would show the effect of the industry in national economies.

“When [tourism ministers] go to their highest authority, there is no bigger argument than employment [of people in the tourism sector],” Frangialli said in his keynote address at the opening of the Workshop on Developing Tourism Statistics and the Tourism Satellite Account Project.

The program would allow government experts to properly define tourists, as well as properly account the expenditures in the country.

According to Xu Jing, UNWTO representative to Asia-Pacific, government support for the tourism sector is very important since the industry is seen as an effective weapon against extreme poverty.

“We need to push the tourism agenda a step higher. Without this [data] the ministers of finance will not give sufficient fund for tourism and the central banks would not be able to determine the income earned from tourism,” he said.

Frangialli said the UNWTO for the past three years has been pushing for development in the proper gathering of data in the employment, the balance of payments and the effect of tourism in the regional and local destination levels.

“Sometimes we have a picture of the entire country, but we do not know the effect of tourism to places like Cebu,” Frangialli said in an interview.

The results of the workshops at Shangri-La’s Mactan Island Resort and Spa will be tackled when tourism leaders meet in Bali, Indonesia, next year with experts from the International Labor Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the UN Statistics department.

Philippine Tourism Secretary Joseph Ace Durano said the country would start an “overhaul” of the way data is gathered and reported in the department.

“We will overhaul the way we capture data and report them, and our base year will be 2009. We will get more data that is more relevant like jobs [created] and livelihood [generated] by the tourism industry,” he said in a press conference.

“We need to have credible data about what exactly is the contribution of tourism to the country so policymakers would know how much to allocate in to industry.”

Durano said the tourism department relies mainly on arrivals which, he admitted, gives a very limited view on the sector.

“We don’t know how many of these people went to Bohol, Cebu or Boracay and how much they spent while there,” he said. “We need to collaborate with the local government in this effort. These data are lying around, we just need to collaborate it.”

With technical and financial help from the Japanese government, Durano said the department would roll out a pilot program for local governments to assist in gathering complete and credible data on tourists.

The initial phase of the program will involve the country’s top tourism provinces—Cebu, Bohol, Negros Oriental, Negros Occidental, Palawan, Iloilo and Aklan.

A Report by The Mole