Regional data guests and overnight stays not yet reliable enough
Good policy-making in the tourism and recreation sector requires reliable data. There is a great need for data at regional and local level on the number of guests and overnight stays in accommodation facilities. To meet this need, CELTH, NBTC and CBS explored within the Data & Development Lab last year whether the CBS Statistics on Accommodation (SLA) could be further regionalised to the level of municipalities and tourism-relevant regions. Unfortunately, this proved less straightforward than expected. Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
Diana Korteweg Maris from CELTH and HZ Kenniscentrum Kusttoerisme: ‘Regional and local figures on tourism are incredibly important, after all, tourism policy is mainly made by municipalities. We therefore looked very extensively at the possibilities of regionalising existing tourism statistics. Unfortunately, this does not allow us to present reliable figures at municipal level. But we continue to work with our partners on possibilities to generate more regional data.’
Current working method
The SLA is based on a sample among accommodation establishments, with the answers of participating companies being scaled up to the total number of accommodation establishments in an area. This now provides reliable data for the Netherlands as a whole, the provinces, five major cities and some major tourist areas. The reliability of these data depends on several factors, including the number of accommodations and the diversity of accommodations in the sample. Together, this determines the reliability of the results.
Analysis results
The 2023 dataset shows that reliable data on the number of guests and overnight stays are available for only a small proportion of municipalities and regions. For the majority, the data are not sufficiently reliable to publish at the level of municipalities or tourism-relevant regions.
On the projectpage the report is available for download.
Explore expansion of data collection
Therefore, the conclusion is that the current SLA data are not suitable for further regionalisation to the level of municipalities or tourism-relevant regions in a reliable way. CBS, NBTC and CELTH are investigating what possibilities there are to achieve reliable regional figures, so that the growing need for regional and local data can indeed be met in the future.