DOT, JICA team up on tourism statistics

MANILA, Philippines - The Department of Tourism (DOT) is in its third and final year of a technical assistance scheme in collaboration with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) designed to boost tourism statistics capabilities at the national and regional levels.

Commenced in 2009, the three-year project is aimed at improving the department’s and LGU’s capacity to formulate tourism development plans by enhancing database-building skills. Beneficiaries of the technical assistance consist of the tourism and planning officers from a total of 113 local government units (LGUs) from Regions VI and VII and Palawan.

“Accurate information about the state of our industry is very important to guide government, private sector and foreign investors in planning out investments. With this, we hope to develop and strengthen institutional mechanisms at the national, regional and local levels to support the generation of the statistics needed by both government and the private sector,” said Tourism Secretary Ramon R. Jimenez Jr.

The project, which will be completed in March 2012, will produce as final outputs the publication of a Tourism Statistics Report, as well as training modules and a revised Tourism Statistics Manual for LGUs. A culminating activity, the National Tourism Conference, is scheduled early next year to highlight best practices among LGUs in the collection and compilation of tourism statistics.

Basic tourism statistics training (BTST) workshops were conducted in the first year of the project to provide a uniform system of gathering, recording and reporting basic indicators for tourism statistics. In particular, participants were taught how to derive indicators such as occupancy rates and average lengths of stay from supply-and-demand data such as number of rooms and visitor volume.

Visitor surveys were also introduced to the participants to enable them to derive basic profiles and travel characteristics of visitors to their region. A module on tourism development planning was started this year to highlight the use of basic indicators and survey results gathered by the LGUs as input in their respective development plans.

The BTST module is currently being replicated in the provinces and regions outside of the DOT-JICA project.