Tourism statistics for local planning: challenges and proposals

The increasing importance of tourism in many urban and rural areas hascalled into question the adequacy of official statistical sources for specific local needs.However, several problems affect actual official statistics in tourism which make theminappropriate for destination management purposes. The present work starts from asimple question about the actual number of tourists in a given destination byformalizing the answer through a conceptual model which links official statisticsavailable at local level with the tourism trips undertaken in the destination considered.The relevance of several parameters and quantities is highlighted and some proposalsfor their estimate are made. The importance of other information at local level, giventhe changing nature of demand and the increasing segmentation of the holyday market,is addressed.