Tourism statistics for local planning: challenges and proposals

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

The probabilities of selection of first and second stage units in the Time Location Sampling (TLS) design on incoming tourism in Sicily and Sardinia

The present work aims to illustrate the criteria used for the determination of probabilities of selection of first and second stage units, given the available information, within the TLS design implemented for the survey of the Relevant National Interest Project (PRIN) on mobility of regional incoming tourism in Sicily and Sardinia. First and second stage units selection probabilities are necessary for the implementation of Hansen-Hurwitz class estimators for the estimation of the average number of stops made by tourists in Sicily, for the estimation of the share of un-observed tourism, and for the sampling errors associated

Seasonality in tourism: a critical review of its main measures

The purpose of this study is to estimate the risk of second primary cancer (SPC) in 129 consecutive patients with splenic marginal zone lymphoma (SMZL) diagnosed in three Italian haematological centres. The person-years method deriving as a sum ofproducts ofage- and sex- specific rates and ofthe corresponding time at risk was used. The SPC Standardized Incidence Ratio ISIR) was 2.03 with a 95% confidence interval: [1.05,3.56] (p < 0.05) and the corresponding Absolute Excess Risk (AER) was 145.8 (per 10000 SMZL patients per year). Our findings evidence a high frequency of additional cancers in patients with SMZL and suggest that the incidence rate of SPCs is significantly different from that expected in the general population