How Local tourism managers can benefit from national surveys: estimating tourism and restaurant expenditures for small market segments

During the last years, the implementation of large tourism behaviour surveys organized at national level has been generalized in many countries. However, since many of the tourism policies are decided at a local level, regional planners and managers frequently question the usefulness of these national surveys when, in fact, the number of available surveys representing their regions is too small to get a representative view of the tourists’ profiles in their specific destination or business. This work presents and applies small area techniques to overcome the problem of obtaining estimators of certain variables of interest for very specific market segments, taking advantage of the cross-information that defines the segment. To illustrate the technique, the Spanish Household Budget Survey is considered, in particular, two specific categories, related to tourism spending, illustrating the potential of the methodology in travel and tourism planning. The results show the possibility of extracting expenditure information in market segments even in the absence of sample observations.