HAVING more focused and relevant tourism data boosts the chances of an increased budget allocation for tourism development in a country.

Government leaders have been demanding to know how much tourism is contributing to their economies in terms of employment and balance of payments.

Although they lend political support and attention, they will not know how much funding to give for tourism without a scientific basis.

This was emphasized by tourism officials during the workshop on developing tourism statistics and the tourism satellite account (TSA) project that opened yesterday at the Shangri-La’s Mactan Resort and Spa prior to the 6th United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) International Tourism Forum for Parliamentarians and Local Authorities.

Apart from dealing with issues that concern the relationships between tourism and employment and balance of payments, the workshop was a venue for UNWTO to appeal to Asian governments to speed up the process of using TSA in their cities and countries.

TSA is the system of accounting at the national, regional or local level that will reveal the total direct impact of tourism on the economy.

“TSA is an instrument of measurement that will enable us to communicate a common language composed of concepts, definitions, data and statistics that will indicate how much tourism is contributing to the gross domestic product and job creation of a country,” explained UNWTO Secretary-General Francesco Frangialli.

Xu Jing, regional representative for Asia and the Pacific of UNWTO, noted that Asian countries need to catch up with countries like Canada, France and Spain where TSA is already in full operations.

He acknowledged, though, that Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore have already started their own TSAs, while the Philippines, which already has a TSA, has gone beyond this by collaborating with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (Jica) for a capability building program.

In a press conference, Tourism Secretary Joseph Ace Durano said that Jica will be funding this program for eight local
government units (LGUs)–Cebu, Bohol, Iloilo, Aklan, Oriental Negros, Occidental Negros, Palawan, and Boracay—where 90 percent of the tourism activities are happening.

“We need the LGUs (local government units) to capture the data since Department of Tourism (DOT) personnel are only limited to the regional level,” he said.

The three-year DOT-Jica project is in the stage of organizing workshops and dispatching experts. Jica used financial resources that were left after the completion of a sustainable environmental management plan for Palawan last year.

“With new data, we hope we can create a case to get more budget from the national government,” said Durano.

He said that the DOT received a budget allocation of P1 billion for this year. Some P1.2 billion is included in the proposed budget for next year.

Durano said if the national government will not know where tourists arriving in the country are going, what they are doing, and how they are spending their money, it will have second thoughts on how much to allocate for tourism development.

“In tourism culture, if only many people know how much the contribution of tourism in their areas is, it will be easy to ask civilians to take care of our tourists. Our limitation is that we cannot make our data on arrivals relevant yet to their lives,” he said.

This prompted the DOT to work with UNWTO in improving its statistical capability and to decide to overhaul its data collection methods with 2009 as its base year.

And partners are necessary, said Frangialli, because a good framework for data collection would be useless without cooperation between the private and public sectors. (NRC) -Sun.Star Cebu