Strategies for Monitoring Tourism
in Your Community's Economy

List of Examples
Example 1. Estimating Lodging and Total Expenditures from Bed Taxes.
Example 2. Estimating Lodging Expenditures at the County Level
Example 3. Estimating Total Room-Nights and Average Price Per Room-Night Using Hotel Occupancy and Bed Tax Data.
Example 4. Tracking Visitation to Major Attractions.
Example 5. Estimating Total Visitor Expenditures to Costs of Promotion Using Visitor Center Cost Data.
Example 6. Estimating Direct Revenues and Direct Costs from Tourism.
Example 7. Calculating Location Quotients for Tourism Related Sectors.

As tourism continues to develop across the world it creates both positive and negative impacts upon host cultures and societies, local, regional and national economies and upon natural and created environments. Papers will explore the variety of tourism's impacts, together with the issues surrounding how we measure, monitor and plan for the changes tourism effects.

Tourism plays a critical role as a provider of jobs and income in many communities. Local Chambers of Commerce are often involved in tourism marketing and product development. While Chamber executives and others who provide support for tourism can point to real products such as attractions and advertising materials, it is more difficult to get a handle on what tourism means to the local economy.

The purpose of this bulletin is to provide ideas for tracking local tourism activity. If you hold a position that is responsible for tourism promotion or development, you may already be collecting and using some of this information. Perhaps you need ideas concerning how to present this information to the media and local decision makers. This bulletin can help. In addition, this bulletin will explain how to use this information to make strategic planning decisions.

The two principal methods for estimating recreation and tourism-related spending and economic impacts are (1) Satellite Accounts and (2) Visitor surveys/input-output models. Satellite accounts are primarily used to give an overall aggregate estimate of the contribution of tourism activity to state and national economies. They extract tourism-related activity from a system of national (or state) accounts. When spending and impacts are desired for particular market segments or for local regions, survey approaches are generally used. Spending data is gathered in visitor surveys and applied to estimates of the volume of tourist activity in an area. Spending totals are then applied to regional economic models or multipliers to estimate economic impacts on the local area, usually including secondary or "multiplier effects".

Several organizations have developed satellite accounts for tourism. A satellite account re-organizes the national system of accounts to identify the contribution of tourism to a state or national economy. The advantage of satellite accounting approach is it uses existing economic data and embeds tourism in an accepted system of accounts. The drawback is that the information necessary to extract tourism activity from national economic accounts is often not complete or consistently gathered. Also, satellite methods are much more difficult to apply below the national level or for subcategories of tourism activity. National accounts are organized around a set of industries or commodities. The problem is that tourism is more a type of customer than either an industry or a type of commodity. Restaurants serve both tourists and local residents and the system of accounts has no easy way to distinguish one from the other. The basic procedure in satellite accounting is to claim a "share" of sales of each commodity or industry to tourism. These shares, however can vary widely for different regions. Information to estimate them generally comes from various sources including surveys of households or tourists. Many of these surveys are not carried out on a consistent basis and are subject to a variety of sampling and measurement errors. Tourist shares also depend considerably on how tourism is defined - usually all trips of 100 miles or more or overnight.

Initial satellite efforts have focused on visitor trip spending. Some have added capital expenditures (e.g. hotel development) and selected durable goods purchases (RV's, boats, etc.) to the tourism account. There remain questions of how far the accounts should be extended, for example into imputed rents for seasonal homes, construction of seasonal homes, and even the manufacturing of passenger aircraft and automobiles. How far should tourism's economic impacts be traced? Satellite accounts generally are restricted to the direct effects of tourist spending, not the indirect or induced economic activity.

A more common approach to estimating economic impacts of tourism is to directly survey tourists to estimate their spending. Estimates of spending can be translated into the resulting jobs and income in a given area using appropriate economic ratios and multipliers. The direct survey method is more applicable to estimating impacts of particular actions on a local economy, e.g., what is the impact of a new 100 site campground or a museum that will attract 50,000 visitors to the area. These more focused impact studies frequently also include multiplier effects of tourist spending on a region, as they focus more directly on impacts using a with vs without framework to evaluate impacts of a particular action. Satellite accounts only cover direct effects and tend to demonstrate the overall "importance or significance" of tourism industries to a region rather than "impacts".

Tourist spending = Number of Visitors x Average spending per visitor

Economic impact = Number of Visitors x Average spending per visitor x Regional Multipliers

(equation 1)

• Economic impacts may be estimated in terms of spending, sales, income, value added, tax revenues and employment.
• Estimating the number of visitors requires a clear definition of what a visitor (tourist) is and what units tourism activity is measured in (e.g. person trips, person nights, party nights, party trips). Tourists are generally visitors from outside the region of interest. Reliable estimates of tourism activity and spending frequently require that tourists be divided into distinct segments with different spending patterns. Visitation estimates can be made from a variety of sources including surveys and various visitor counting methods.
• Average spending of tourists on trips can be measured in visitor spending studies, either by sampling trips at destination areas or asking about recent trips in a household survey. Because spending varies widely across types of trips, we recommend a segmented approach.
• Multipliers (and economic ratios) can be used to convert spending to income and jobs as well as to capture secondary impacts of tourist spending (multiplier effects). There are many distinct kinds of multipliers -- ratio and Keynesian, Types I, II and III, sales, income and employment multipliers, aggregate and sector-specific multipliers. We do not recommend using multipliers without an understanding of the various types and how they should be used. Multipliers will vary with the economic characteristics of the region and the kinds of spending/sectors involved. An aggregate "tourism multiplier" must assume a given distribution of tourist spending and will vary from one area to another. When available, visitor spending may be applied to a complete input-output model of the region's economy to estimate economic impacts on the region.

Our preferred impact measure is income. The income to the region is reflected in the wages, salaries, rents and profits generated by tourist spending and also the revenues to local government units from taxes. Economists generally use the "value added" by the region's economy as the preferred measure for assessing the contribution of a given industry or activity to a region's economy. Value added is basically the income and indirect business taxes generated by the activity. Tourist spending can yield a distorted picture of tourism's impacts, particularly when tourists are buying goods that are not made in the local area. In these cases only the retail margins on these goods show up as direct sales in the local area and contribute to regional income. The "capture rate" estimates the portion of tourism spending that shows up as direct sales in a region's economy. Although there is great interest in tourism's employment effects, job estimates can be misleading given the large number of part time and seasonal jobs associated with tourism in many areas. All jobs are not "equal" making aggregate estimates or comparisons across regions and industries problematic. Income is a relatively clear measure of impact that can be directly compared across industries and regions with quite distinct types of tourism and economic activity.

There are several sources of data available to help track tourism in your community. These data can help you estimate the number of visitors to the community and tourist expenditures. The data can also reveal visitor characteristics and trends in tourism.

a. Bed Tax Revenues

The most objective source of data for monitoring tourism in the local economy is bed tax revenue data. These data are often available at the city, county, and state level. If you know the tax rate and have bed tax revenue data, you can estimate total expenditures at lodging places very effectively. You can also break these data out seasonally.

Before you do, talk to the fiscal officer who keeps this information to find out if he/she is reporting the total collected for each month or the total amount due. If it is the total collected, it could represent taxes due in previous months, not just the current month. The total collected per month may vary in ways unrelated to the total amount due each month. Typically, this month's tax receipts were actually collected by hotels in the previous month. It may not be possible to compare these data on a month to month basis. However, it may still be possible to compare for the winter and summer season and for the year.

Example 1. Estimating Lodging and Total Expenditures from Bed Taxes.

Let's say that the city bed tax is 8 percent. The annual total of bed taxes collected is $100,000. This means that the amount spent on lodging in the city was $100,000/.08 = $ 1,250,000. Unfortunately, we don't have any way of determining how much was spent by leisure visitors and how much by business visitors.

Some hotels and motels may not be within city limits and will not be included in your lodging expenditure estimates. You may need to collect data directly from them on their average room rates and occupancy rates by month to estimate their contribution to total lodging expenditures. Likewise, your city may have just annexed an existing hotel. This will cause the city lodging taxes to increase even though total lodging expenditures in the area have not really increased. Also, have average room rates increased over the previous year? Are the increases in bed tax collections the result of increased visitations or higher room rates?

In addition to bed taxes imposed by cities and counties, the state of Arizona charges a 5.5 percent bed tax. It records these data by county and by month. These data are available in the "Special Report on Taxable Sales" published by Arizona Department of Revenue. This is another source for estimating total visitor expenditures on lodging and on total expenditures at the county level. You can also use these data in combination with city data to estimate lodging expenditures at the sub-county level.

Example 2. Estimating Lodging Expenditures at the County Level

b. Hotel Room Inventory and Occupancy Rates

At the very least, you should maintain an inventory of the number of hotels, motels, bed and breakfasts, dude ranches, outfitters, RV parks, and campgrounds in the area, the number of rooms or spaces that they offer, rates, and the name of the current manager in your database. In addition, you may be able to get local hoteliers to cooperate in providing you with their monthly occupancy rates throughout the year. Knowing the size of each facility and the occupancy rate gives you a basis for estimating room-nights spent in the community.

Note: Confidentiality is essential in gathering such information. Data on a specific firm should generally not be shared publicly. Instead, share only aggregated data or totals for all lodging in public documents.

With this information you can track the changes in the number of rooms or spaces available in the community over time. You can also track the number of room-nights spent in the community over time. By dividing total estimated expenditures in hotels from bed tax revenues by room-nights, you can estimate average cost per room-night over time as well.

The number of rooms multiplied by the number of nights in a month, season, or year gives the total supply of room-nights in your community for the month, season, or year. A summation of the average occupancy rate times the number of room-nights for the month, season, or year for each lodging facility will give you an estimate of total demand for the number of room-nights. You can graph room-night supply and demand over time to see what trends are occurring in your community.

Example 3. Estimating Total Room-Nights and Average Price Per Room-Night Using Hotel Occupancy and Bed Tax Data.

c. Attraction Visitor Counts and Admissions

Another valuable set of data are visitor counts and admission to area attractions. These can be useful indicators of total visitor numbers in tracking trends at specific attractions. However, without survey data, it is difficult to use these data directly to estimate visitor numbers and impacts. This is because both local residents and visitors may visit attractions and it can be difficult or impossible to determine what percent of total people admitted are visitors. A review of the sign-in registers at your community's attractions will indicate what percent of total visitors are local residents. However, local residents tend to be less likely to sign such registers, thus you may overestimate the percentage of out-of-town visitors using this method.

In addition, visitors to an area are likely to visit more than one attraction. Without survey data indicating the average number of attractions visited and which attractions are visited, it is difficult to use the attraction visitor counts to estimate total visitors to the community. Finally, not all visitors to a community will visit local attractions, especially if they are in the community on business or to see family and friends.

Visitor count and admission data may be available from public attractions such as national and state parks, from nonprofit attractions such as museums, botanical gardens, and zoological gardens, and from private attractions such as IMAX theaters and amusement parks. The best counts are generally kept at attractions that have paid admission and have turnstiles at the entrance.

Find out what kinds of visitor count data are available from local attractions. If some of your local attractions do not already keep a good count on the number of visitors (as is frequently the case for attractions with free admission), then you might consider working with them to establish a registry or to install turnstiles, door counters, or road counters. Door counter numbers should be divided by two to account for entering and exiting the attraction.

You should randomly survey the average number of people who come through the door (or drive up in a car) to compare against the door count (or road count) number. Do periodic counts on randomly selected days at randomly selected times. It is easy to be criticized for inflating or undercounting if you do not periodically check the average number of people entering the door or arriving by car. Even national parks have been criticized for using inaccurate average number of people per car in their estimates of total visitors. Turnstiles at the entrance tend to be more accurate since they count only the entry and count one person at a time. However, turnstiles are more expensive to install than door counters.

Paid admissions may be a good way to keep count, except that some attractions sell memberships or an annual pass and allow free admission to card holders. Unless the attraction keeps track of member and complimentary admissions separately, these may be overlooked. Another problem with admission data is that if different admissions are charged for various age groups, it may not be easy to estimate total number of people admitted from the gross admission receipts alone. Check to see if your local attractions keep track of tickets sold by admission price category (such as children, adults, families, and senior citizens).

Example 4. Tracking Visitation to Major Attractions.

See Example 7, Calculating Annual Growth Rates for Bed Tax Revenues, for one way to calculate average growth rate.

d. Event Related Figures

Events that are held in enclosed areas and require admission are the easiest to monitor. Use of event locations with limited entrances and exits (such as fair and rodeo grounds) might be encouraged even when admission is not charged in order to keep better track of the number of visitors. When this is not possible, due to the nature of the event or the purpose of the event, then it may be necessary to use other sources of information to estimate attendance. These include estimates by police of crowd size and estimates by volunteers with hand held counters stationed at key entry or exit areas and traffic counts. You may be able to supplement some of this information with data on raffle ticket sales or soft drink sales.

Check with the city or town transportation division to see if road counters are in place in the area where the event is to be held. If they are, the difference between the average counts for a particular day of the week and the actual count for the day of the event should help in estimating approximate attendance at the event. How effective road counters are will depend on the number of vehicle access points to the event and the placement of the counters. It may be possible to request that a road counter be installed at the access point to parking just for the event as a means of estimating attendance.

Another way to estimate attendance for events where there is no admission fee, is to rely on crowd estimates by police officers. Find out from the local police what kind of training they have had in estimating crowds, and when they will be making their estimates. For some events, people may be spending the whole day, for others, they may just be visiting a few hours. Hence, if the amount of turnover in visitors is not known it may be difficult to estimate total attendance based on periodic police crowd estimates.

If there are a limited number of entrances into the event and you have a large group of volunteers helping you, you could have volunteers at the entrances with hand counters keeping track of the number of people coming into the event area. Of course, some people may come in and out of the event area more than once during their visit. As mentioned earlier, keeping track of the number of soft drinks sold or the number of individual sales of raffle tickets (not just the number of tickets sold) can be other ways of estimating attendance at an event. Since not everyone at an event will buy a soft drink or raffle tickets, and others will buy more than one, these counts generally provide only rough estimates of attendance.

At this point, you may be convinced that charging some sort of entrance fee to events makes sense not only as a way of raising money to support the event, but also as a way of keeping track of attendance. At some events, people who pay admission get a discount off of one or more purchases that they make at the event to help offset their admission fee. In other events, each paid admission is awarded a raffle ticket. This may help ease the pain of having to pay for admission.

In some instances, you may just want to do periodic car counts to get an estimate of visitation to the community. License plate counts can be particularly useful in communities with a high level of out-of-state visitors, but may not be so useful if most of your visitors are from in-state. You will also not be counting out-of-state and foreign visitors who rented a car with in-state plates and drove to your community.

In a car or license plate survey, you can randomly select times and dates to send volunteers to main entries into the community to count the number and type of license plates they see. On streets with more than two lanes, a volunteer might monitor one lane for half of the period and the other lane for the other half of the period. If visitation to your community is concentrated on particular days or times of the year, you may just want to monitor license plates during these peak times. Volunteers should monitor both the number of in-state and out-of-state license plates that they see to help in estimating out-of-state licensed cars as a percent of the total. Visitor counts can also be derived by counting the number of designated parking spaces and then monitoring their occupancy during the day.

e. Visitor Information From Visitor Centers

Many local Chambers of Commerce, Convention and Visitor Bureaus, and Tourism Authorities maintain visitor centers to provide information to tourists. Keeping counts of people who stop for information is another good source of visitor numbers. There is typically no admission fee to enter a visitor center, so door counters and registration books are used to keep track of visitors.

A registration book can be used effectively to collect more information than where the visitor is from. You can also set up the registration to ask a few simple questions, such as how many nights visitors are staying in the community and how many people are in their visitor party. Appendix A contains some examples of registration forms.

Keep in mind that generally only a portion of total visitors stop at a visitor center and their characteristics may not be typical of all visitors. In the Globe-Miami study, 15 percent of all visitors stopped at a visitor center. In the Tucson study, 3 percent of visitors staying in commercial accommodations stopped at a visitor center. Appendix B compares some characteristics of visitors who stopped at a visitor center in Globe-Miami and Tucson to all visitors to those communities.

f. Cost Information from Visitor Centers and Promotions

It can be exciting tracking visitor revenues, but many people who work in tourism are less excited about tracking the costs of tourism. Some of the indirect costs like congestion and increases in living costs are difficult to document. However, direct costs for visitor centers and tourism promotion are relatively easy to track. Visitor center costs can be broken out and tracked as a separate expenditure in your organization's budget. Be sure to include time spent by staff on serving visitors in this amount. If all bed tax revenues are earmarked for tourism development and promotion, then these expenditures can also be documented and shared with local leaders and citizens. In addition, if there are events held primarily for out-of-town visitors, the revenues and costs of these events can be tracked. If the costs are consistently greater than the revenues, it may be time to evaluate whether the event should continue.

Often you hear tourism promoters claim that for each dollar in tourism promotion, they generate X dollars in tourist expenditure. The most common way they reach this amount is by dividing total tourist expenditures by the amount spent on promotion. While their claims are not completely accurate, the ratio of tourist expenditures to promotion expenditures is worth tracking over time.

The promoters claims are not completely accurate because factors other than traditional tourism promotion affect visitors' decisions about how much to spend. For example, the creation of new shopping areas, new attractions, and new events can increase expenditures even if promotional expenditures stay the same. Likewise, the quality of customer service and of visitor facilities such as lodging and restaurants can affect the number of visitors and their expenditures. The ratio of promotional costs to visitors' expenditures can be used to track changes over time and to compare relative to other communities.

Example 5. Estimating Total Visitor Expenditures to Costs of Promotion Using Visitor Center Cost Data.

Let's say that total tourist expenditures in your community are $2,000,000. The budget for the visitor center and all promotions last year was $100,000. Therefore, the ratio of visitor expenditures to promotion costs is $2,000,000/$100,000 = 20. The following year, let's say that tourist expenditures were $1,800,000 and promotion costs were $100,000. The ratio now falls to 18. This may be due to a single poor tourism season or it may be due to ineffective use of the promotion funds. If the trend continues, it should be of concern.

Example 6. Estimating Direct Revenues and Direct Costs from Tourism.

g. Studies From Other Communities

Characteristics of visitors and their level of expenditures can vary significantly between communities. Unfortunately, visitor surveys can be expensive to do and are frequently only conducted in larger metropolitan areas and in heavily visited regions. You can still benefit from the information that you find in studies that have been done at the state, regional, county, and metropolitan area level and studies of other communities.

Generally, you will have ideas about what type of visitor you want to attract. Pay particular attention to studies that provide information on a type of visitor who is desired in your community. Studies that provide information on visitors based on their activities or interests can also be very helpful. If you want to attract more eco- or nature tourists to your community, examine the characteristics of these types of visitors from studies of other areas.

You can learn many different things from these studies. For example, they can tell you about the typical age, education and income of these types of visitors. Are you dealing with retirees or twenty-somethings? You can learn, on average, how much these visitors spend and how long they stay. Are they coming on day trips or are they overnight visitors? Do they stay in hotels, camp, or stay with family and friends? You may learn what else they are interested in doing and where else they have been on their trip. Is this a single purpose, single destination trip or a multiple destination, multiple purpose trip? What else you learn will depend on the specific questions asked in the study you are reviewing.

You can use visitor study information in many different ways in tourism promotion, development, event planning, and attraction planning. In promotion, the information can help you decide where and when to advertise. For example, knowing that most visitors are from neighboring large cities and vacation in the summer in other towns like yours, may make you decide to spend most of your advertising budget in the those cities during the summer. Visitor study results can also help guide tourism development. For example, if you want to attract birders and you have great birding resources but very few hotel rooms, you have a development problem. Serious birders watch birds in the early morning and late afternoon. They like to stay in lodging near where they plan to watch birds. To capture a share of this type of tourism will require developing more commercial lodging in your community. Visitor study information can help you design events to attract the kind of visitors that you want. For example, many baby boomers are interested in hands-on activities. If you are interested in attracting baby boomers, your festival may focus on activities that people can do at the festival. In developing or maintaining attractions, visitor study information can be used to guide projects. For example, if a study at a similar attraction was highly critical of food services, you might want to evaluate the quality of food services at your attraction.

 h. State and National Studies and Data

Example 7. Calculating Location Quotients for Tourism Related Sectors.

As tourism activity grows in your community, you may reach a point where it is critical to do a more intensive study of tourism. Generally, there may be a need to undertake a study under the following circumstances:

1. Tourism is the major industry in the community and there is need for a benchmark of current activity.
2. Your community has experienced significant growth and change in tourism and you need more detailed information about visitor characteristics and expenditures.
3. Your community is on the verge of a major change (addition of new attractions, large increase in number of hotel rooms, etc.) and there is a need to anticipate what effects these changes may have.
4. Your community has decided to focus on a specific niche market and needs more detailed information about this market (for example, residents of the nearest metropolitan area, or a specific interest group such as cultural tourists or adventure travelers).

In some instances, you may be able to find or buy high quality information collected as part of ongoing state or national surveys such as Travelscope, Travel Industry Association special surveys, or national surveys conducted by national tourism consultants. This is especially true if you are trying to target a specific niche market, such as eco-tourism. In other instances, especially when you want detailed information about expenditures and characteristics of visitors to your community, you will have to conduct a study or commission one to be done. In a companion piece to this bulletin called "A Guide to Designing and Conducting Visitor Surveys," the process of actually doing a survey is described in detail (see references).

One of the best starting points for strategic planning in tourism in a community is to focus on what type of visitors you want to attract to your community given the resources that you have. The Western Rural Development Center has published a handbook called "Community Tourism Assessment Handbook" (see references) that is a good starting point for a community that is planning a major development initiative in tourism, or that wants to examine how viable tourism is as a development option for their community.

Take time to assess current tourism activities in your community. What has been the cost/benefit of tourism to the community? What kind of pay back are you getting for the time and resources you are now investing in tourism development? What is the ratio of total tourism expenditures to total direct expenditures on tourism related activities? No community wants to promote tourism if it doesn't pay-if it creates more costs than benefits.

Plan time at least annually to evaluate your tourism development and marketing program, how you are now doing business. Utilize the data you've collected, as suggested in this bulletin, to assess the impact of tourism on the community. Use this data to make strategic choices toward strengthening your visitor attractions, events, and marketing. What actions could be taken to increase the level of expenditures made by visitors to your community?

We know from numerous studies that the money spent by tourists occurs largely in the community where the visitor spends the night. Visitors that stay overnight in your community in commercial accommodations spend more money per person, per party, and per trip than visitors who do not. This is not only because of their lodging expense, but also because these visitors are more likely to eat out in local restaurants and typically spend more time in local shops.

What percent of your current visitors are staying overnight in the community? How could that number be increased? Are your eating and lodging facilities memorable? What could be done to make an overnight stay in your community more appealing? If your community is a gateway to other area attractions, what can be done to insure that visitors return to your community for the evening rather than spend the night somewhere else? Strategies you might consider are guided tours, evening seminars or special entertainment, a self-guide for evening walks, unique lodging decor, added service, unique food items on local menus, retail shops open in the evening, a free community memento, special evening events at your visitor attractions, and a list of evening and weekend activities available in your community (e.g. calf roping, little league sports, dances, movies, window shopping, star gazing, early morning bird watching). Emphasize your community's overnight amenities in any promotional materials. If most visitors to your community are currently day trippers, you may be footing much of the cost of tourism without receiving the benefits.

Those visitors who are now spending the night in commercial lodging in your community and those visitors who are repeat visitors are the ones you especially want to keep happy. Listen to them closely when they have concerns or suggestions. Communities that fail to develop local accommodations and evening attractions will be continually frustrated by the low returns they get from tourism. Communities that are successful at bringing visitors back to their community are building a strong customer base.

Survey data show that the more time visitors spend in your community, the more money they spend. Are your current community attractions strong enough to hold people for a half a day, for a full day, for an overnight? What can be done to extend the amount of time visitors spend in each of your attractions? How attractive are local shopping facilities? Do you have unique tourist-oriented products for sale? Local cash registers will ring only if visitors are provided unique and rewarding ways to spend their money.

Some studies show that return visitors spend more than first-time visitors. In addition, the amount of time and money needed to attract repeat visitors is less than that required to attract a first-time visitor. Repeat visitors are also a good source of word-of-mouth advertising. Communities need to diligently work at turning current visitors into return visitors. Successful attractions target previous visitors in their marketing program.

As indicated earlier, today's visitors are taking frequent, shorter vacations, closer to home. Nationwide, short vacations presently account for 80% of vacation travel. Average length of trip is 2 to 4 days, often including a weekend. Average distance traveled is 75 to 100 miles. Consider putting together and marketing a special weekend/overnight get-away package to your community targeted to in-state residents.

Trends further indicate that today's visitors are increasingly experience seekers and are no longer content to be mere sight-seers. This is particularly true for the aging 'baby boomer' that will dominate the tourist market in the next decade. Such travelers want unique, authentic, life enriching experiences. They want to be involved. They want to learn about things. Historic experiences are increasingly popular. Ecological vacations are the fastest growing visitor segment today. This includes agriculture as well as outdoor adventure. Unique, ethnic, and gourmet food items are sought. These experience seekers tend to stay in the community longer and spend more. What can be done to incorporate experiential activities into your current attractions?

Are your visitor attractions self-sustaining, i.e. generating enough visitor revenue to cover costs of operation? If they are not, reassess the fees charged and/or improve the quality of the attraction.

Is your public infrastructure (streets, water, sidewalks, parks, directional signage, visitor information, public restrooms, etc.) adequate to host visitors? Is your community attractive and inviting to visitors? Are inadequate restrooms forcing visitors to shorten their stay in your community? Are tax revenues generated by visitors adequate to service the public infrastructure they demand?

Who benefits economically from the special events your community now hosts? Are adequate revenues generated through ticket sales, space rentals, commissions, business subscriptions, etc. to return a profit to the hosting organization? If not, how can that be changed? What percent of your food and other vendors are local residents/businesses that pay local sales tax versus out-of-town vendors? What percent of your event visitors are staying overnight in your community? Are sales and bed tax revenues generated by the special event sufficient to cover the public costs of the event (police services, garbage collection, rest rooms, litter clean-up, etc.)? Many communities routinely host special events without assessing how those events might be redesigned to increase revenue to the community. Consider targeting your event to higher value customers through for-fee special tours, seminars, and small group experiential activities.

Use the data available to you in your planning efforts. If admission at key attractions is down, include finding out why as a project in the next year. If the community is having trouble attracting new motels, and thus increasing (or replacing obsolete) rooms available, make finding out why a key objective in your strategic plan. If you identify a specific target market for promotional purposes, search out as much existing information as you can find on this market. Ask tough questions. Does your community have a high value experience to offer this market? If not, what must you do to improve your product? If you do have the product, how do you reach your target market?

Many businesses are very concerned about how satisfied their customers are with their product or service and will provide ways for their customers to provide this feedback. You may want to find out which tourism and travel related businesses are doing this already and what they have learned. If you find that few businesses are doing this, you might want to provide training in getting customer feedback to local businesses and to attraction managers.

There are a variety of ways to get this information. They include using community swaps, focus groups, and short surveys. A community swap involves inviting groups of people who work in tourism and travel related businesses from a community of similar size as yours (and hopefully with similar levels of tourism activity as your community) to come spend a few days in your community assessing your attractions and facilities. Usually in such a swap, you send a group of people from your community to their community to do the same thing. You ask the group to share their observations and recommendations for improving services and amenities in your community. It helps if you prepare a check list and set of questions that you want your community swap visitors to use as a basis for their evaluation. An example of such a checklist is provided in Appendix H.

Focus groups involve selecting a group of visitors of a particular type and asking them as a group to discuss what they like and dislike about your community. Because group dynamics and the facilitator for the session can have a strong effect on the outcome of focus groups, it is good to do several of them, preferably using different facilitators. The difficulty of forming a focus group of visitors is finding an appropriate time and place to contact potential members. Many people that you approach, especially if they are on vacation, may not be interested, even if you are offering some incentive such as cash to participate.

In this bulletin, we have outlined strategies for collecting information about tourism in your community and the economic contribution it makes. The most credible data source available to you is bed tax data because they are collected by an outside, disinterested source. It is possible to make fairly good estimates of lodging expenditures directly from these data. By making some assumptions about the percentage of total visitor expenditures on lodging, it is possible to come up with a rough estimate of total visitor expenditures (see Example 1). By keeping an inventory of hotels and their total number of rooms, you can track supply of rooms and room-nights in your community. If hotels and motels in your community are willing to share occupancy data, you can estimate demand for room-nights in the community. By combining this information with lodging expenditures, you can track average cost per room-night (see Example 3). Estimating the total number of visitors to the community is extremely difficult without conducting a survey of visitors. However, counting visitors to visitor centers, attractions and events can give you some indicators of visitor levels over time and allow you to assess how well individual attractions and events are doing in your community.

Tourism activity cuts across a number of sectors in the economy, so it is nearly impossible to track total tourism with secondary data. However, this information can be used to see how specific sectors like hotel and lodging, and eating and drinking places are doing over time in the community. Most of these data are available at the county level, but not for smaller communities, and are available several years after they are collected. National, regional and state studies, as well as studies from other communities, can give you some indication of the trends in tourism that may help shape your decisions concerning product development and marketing.

It is important to follow and respond to trends over several years, rather than one year's events. Example 8 presented one way to do this by estimating annual growth rates from bed tax data. You can also compare how your community is doing relative to other communities, the state, and the nation. Reviewing the trends and questions presented in Section VI in conjunction with the data you have collected can help you make tourism related decisions. In addition, consumer feedback from community swaps, focus groups, and postcard surveys can help you assess the quality of customer service in your community.

College of Business and Public Administration and College of Agriculture, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ. 49pp. (http://ag.arizona.edu/AREC/arechome.html see "Regional Economics" under the extension section)

Goldman, George, Anthony Nakazawa, and David Taylor. "Cost-Benefit Analysis of Local Tourism Development." 1994. Available from WRDC (see below or go to http://www.orst.edu/Dept/WRDC/).

Goldman, George, Anthony Nakazawa, and David Taylor. "Tourism: Estimating Community Visitor Days." 1994. Available from

WRDC (see below or go to http://www.orst.edu/Dept/WRDC/).

Goldman, George, Anthony Nakazawa, and David Taylor. "Tourism: Impacts of Visitor Expenditures on Local Revenues." WREP 145. 1994. Available from WRDC (see below or go to http://www.orst.edu/Dept/WRDC/).

Goldman, George, Anthony Nakazawa, and David Taylor. "Tourism: The Economic Impact of Visitors to Your Community." WREP 144. 1994. Available from WRDC (see below or go to http://www.orst.edu/Dept/WRDC/).

University of Arizona. 49 pp. (http://ag.arizona.edu/AREC/arechome.html see "Regional Economics" under the extension section)

Leones, Julie. A Guide to Designing and Conducting Visitor Surveys. Arizona Cooperative Extension Bulletin. 1998. 28pp.