The tourism data gap: The utility of official tourism information for the hospitality and tourism industry

This paper examines the type and quality of information provided by over 110 National Tourism Organizations (NTOs) through their free-to-access websites. The purpose is to evaluate its usefulness to tourism enterprises in general, and in particular small and medium sized businesses which are most likely to be data hungry but resource scarce. The industry needs quality market intelligence and many rely on National Tourism Organizations (NTOs) as a source of this information. The study concludes that only a small number of NTOs provide information that is applicable at an enterprise level. Instead, most provide aggregate information that may be suitable for macro-level reporting purposes.

► This paper identifies over 116 NTOs that make their tourism data available to the public free of charge.
► It presents a comprehensive, global analysis of the types of qualitative and quantitative data provided by NTOs.
► The paper analyzes the utility of these data and concludes that few NTOs provide information that is relevant to SMEs.
► The study identifies those NTOs that provide the most comprehensive and/or user friendly data.