honoluluadvertiser.com

Sponsored by:

Comment, blog & share photos

Log in | Become a member
The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Monday, January 13, 2003

Tourism industry wants more and better data

By Kelly Yamanouchi
Advertiser Staff Writer

As Hawai'i tourism industry leaders face difficult decisions on where to invest their resources in uncertain times, they are asking for more and better state data.

Daily decisions on how much inventory to stock, where to advertise and how many people to hire or fire are based on a mix of good instincts and hard statistics. From the family-run business to the giant hotel chains, those who cater to tourists consider not only how current events affect travel and how their own business is doing, but also depend on state figures to know how many tourists are coming, where they came from and how much they spend here.

Some improvements have been made as the new year begins, but industry managers want still more data and more accurate numbers.

Part of the problem is that many in the state's tourism industry must make decisions for the months and years ahead, while it becomes more difficult to gauge what the future holds just weeks away. Their vision is clouded by economic uncertainty, airline industry turmoil, global fears of war, shifting exchange rates and dozens of other factors.

Tourism officials here say Hawai'i leads the country in the quality and quantity of tourism data issued by the state Department of Business, Economic Development & Tourism.

But "as the years have gone by, we've gotten a lot pickier, a lot more demanding about what those numbers represent, which I think we should be," said Barbara Okamoto, the visitors bureau's vice president for customer relationship management, who analyzes and distributes the data.

Because the tourism authority was established on the premise of increasing visitor spending rather than simply increasing the number of visitors, "We have kind of upped the ante on the level of detail of that information," Okamoto said.

That puts a lot of pressure on DBEDT, according to state economist Pearl Imada Iboshi.

Imada Iboshi said she was uncertain how the research department might change under Ted Liu, the former Morgan Stanley & Co. executive appointed by Gov. Linda Lingle last week to head DBEDT.

"I could imagine a new administration looking at various things that have been done over time and saying it's not necessary, or asking us to do new things," she said.

At the Hawai'i Visitors & Convention Bureau, officials say they depend on data to decide where to allocate state money to market Hawai'i, and they have some ideas about what types of information would be useful. The visitors bureau was responsible for collecting and issuing tourism data before the Hawai'i Tourism Authority was created in 1998 and allocated money to DBEDT for the visitor data.

"The data is so fundamental for us. It's sort of like the air we breathe," Okamoto said.

Visitors bureau president Tony Vericella said the DBEDT data and other research forms a fundamental part of marketing plans. While other states would need to survey tourists flying and driving in, Hawai'i is able to gather more and better data about tourists because the vast majority arrive by plane.

"Hawai'i's research is really considered to be the model that many others want to follow," Vericella said. "That doesn't mean that it's perfect, and that doesn't mean it can't improve."

Keith Vieira, regional vice president for Starwood Hotels & Resorts, agreed. Imada Iboshi "has done a good job, but there's more that she can do, and it would help to get more partnership between the industry and DBEDT," he said.

Many would like to see monthly information on how much tourists are spending in separate areas such as retail, lodging and activities.

With that information, "You would really look at what the habits are of the people that are coming, and that would help you to profile and find people like them that you would like to market to," Vericella said. "It would really help fine-tune your marketing efforts."

DBEDT recently started collecting data on visitor expenditures on each of the Neighbor Islands, and issued its first report in August for the first half of 2002. But the report did not include O'ahu visitor spending data, to the disappointment of some in O'ahu tourism. Imada Iboshi said it was far more difficult to survey enough visitors to represent all of the flights into O'ahu daily.

While Japanese visitors are already surveyed at the airport, Mainland visitors fill out in-flight forms, and a sampling respond to mailed surveys. To start surveying domestic passengers arriving on O'ahu on how much they spent on their trip to Hawai'i, "it would be hugely expensive, because there's so many flights that we would have to cover," Imada Iboshi said. DBEDT is examining whether it can extract O'ahu visitor spending data from existing statewide data.

Another item on the wish list is information on spending by people visiting for meetings, conventions and incentive trips.

For the long term, the tourism industry also will need to know more about the spending habits of tourists from areas outside the major markets of the U.S. Mainland, Japan and Canada, to be ready when developing markets such as Korea, China and parts of Latin America, Europe and Oceania become a bigger presence in Hawai'i's tourism industry, Okamoto said. The small number of visitors from those areas makes it difficult to gather much data now.

While many of the sought-after improvements may be far off, researchers in the department already are working on some improvements and additions to the tourism data they issue.

The Hawai'i Tourism Authority is developing a memorandum of understanding with DBEDT on the data it releases, including standardizing when data is available. In the process of developing the agreement, representatives from the two agencies disagreed on their roles. While tourism authority marketing director Frank Haas said "DBEDT needs to make a case" for conducting more research, Imada Iboshi said DBEDT's ability to conduct research independently is important to its autonomy.

Part of the discussion also involves the cost of increasing accuracy. "DBEDT has always had the desire for higher statistical certainty ... but it's more expensive," said David Carey, a tourism authority board member and chief executive of Outrigger Enterprises Inc.

Another development is that DBEDT, with assistance from Japanese tour wholesaler JTB, started distributing this week a newly revised Japanese questionnaire that is clearer and corresponds to the structure of questioning in Japanese, said Eugene Tian, DBEDT's tourism research manager. That could make Japanese visitor spending figures more accurate, and DBEDT also might improve its processing methods next month.

This month, the state has made minor changes in questions on its survey forms for visitor satisfaction and for Neighbor Islands, and is starting a new survey of crew members of cruise ships.

Meanwhile, another potential source of data is the Hawai'i Tourism Authority's accountability study, aimed at evaluating the visitors bureau's performance by gathering information on potential tourists' intent to travel to Hawai'i and their attitudes about Hawai'i, and how effective Hawai'i marketing is.

The first findings of the study are due after the first quarter of this year, and the information will likely be available to the public, Haas said.

Reach Kelly Yamanouchi at 535-2470, or at kyamanouchi@honoluluadvertiser.com.