Stats NZ to review international visitor spending figures following tourism industry complaints

Thursday, 28 September 2017

The tourism industry says visitor spending figures feed into Government accounts so their accuracy is important.

Statistics NZ will review the way international visitor spending figures are gathered after complaints about the accuracy of data for our largest export industry.

Earlier this month Tourism Industry Aotearoa and about 10 industry leaders wrote to Statistics NZ, Treasury and MBIE expressing concerns about the volatility and reliability of the figures which had showed visitor spend dropping when arrivals were rising.

A recent Stats NZ report released to Stuff under the Official Information Act criticises aspects of the international visitor survey (IVS) conducted by the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE) to calculate tourism spending.

The Stats NZ evaluation of recent movements in the IVS said it had both overstated and understated spend when compared with credit card data and other indicators.

* Lack of critical visitor data puts the tourism industry at risk**

It noted there had been a sizeable spend increase over winter in 2015/16 at a time of low visitor arrivals.

The IVS is supposed to question about 9900 international visitors to New Zealand, but the Stats NZ report said MBIE had met the full quota only once since taking over the survey in 2013.

The monthly response rate averaged more than 80 per cent when it was done face to face, but had dropped to between 26 and 35 per cent online and reasons for this had not been forthcoming from the company contracted to do the survey.

The 52-page report pointed out that despite a significant increase in departures from Queenstown airport, the number of visitors surveyed from there had halved.

It also questioned whether estimates for some quarters were affected by the inclusion of 'outliers' - such as very high spending individuals - that could skew the figures.

The final section was largely redacted from the copy released to Stuff on the grounds that the opinions expressed were those of the author and had not been approved by senior staff.

However, it said very few countries used online surveys to gather visitor spending data, and Australia continued to use face-to-face interviews.

Responding via email MBIE's director of evidence, monitoring and governance Eileen Basher said a 2015 Stats NZ review of the IVS had confirmed it was the best available source of spend data.

The more recent evaluation was 'very much preliminary work' which had not been peer reviewed, and did not provide sufficient evidence to conclude there were any issues with the survey.

'However, acknowledging some concerns raised by industry, MBIE has now asked Stats NZ to conduct another review of the IVS to ensure confidence in the survey.'

Tourism Industry Aotearoa chief executive Chris Roberts said they had been told the review would begin early next year.

He said the tourism industry was focussing on increasing visitor spend, rather than visitor numbers, and it was very hard to know whether it was succeeding if the official measure of spending was 'jumping all over the place.'

The accuracy of the figures was also important because they fed into official Government statistics such as gross domestic product and the balance of payments, and also affected monthly regional tourism estimates, said Roberts.

Meanwhile MBIE data for the year to the end of August showed domestic and international visitor spending increased 9 per cent nationally to $27b, and the West Coast was the fastest growing region with visitor spend up 14 per cent to $534m.