REP 2023 Update | Revisions to tourism employment and GDP time series

While the Infometrics methodology for estimating tourism employment and GDP has not changed there have been substantial revisions to the data inputs to our tourism models which resulted in changes to the historical time series. 

The revisions to input data include:

• Revisions have been made to total tourism employment and GDP from the Tourism Satellite Accounts (TSA) published by Stats NZ. For example, total tourism employment in 2022 has been revised downwards from 145,032 to 127,980. According to Stats NZ:

These updates reflect COVID-19 related methodological challenges and further assessment and interpretation of the expenditure compositional change as part of the 2023 cycle of annual analysis and updated input datasets. Data presented in this TSA for these years should serve to provide initial guidance but may be subject to larger than usual updates.

• We have stopped using TECTs (Tourism Electronic Card Transactions) as an input to our regional tourism model to spread national tourism employment and GDP across territorial authorities. We were forced to use TECTS from 2021 onwards after the Monthly Regional Tourism Estimates (MRTEs) were discontinued by MBIE in 2020 at the start of the pandemic. TECTs were developed as an interim replacement to the MRTEs and only provided a partial picture of tourism spending as they are a subset of MRTEs.
• We now use the fully revised Monthly Regional Tourism Estimates (MRTE) which were relaunched by MBIE in 2023 covering the period 2019 to 2023. The new MRTEs are compiled using a revised methodology. The changes in the methodology can be viewed at mbie.govt.nz. Total tourism expenditure for some territorial authorities has been revised significantly in the new MRTEs. For example, the old MRTEs estimated total tourism expenditure in Waikato District for the 2019 calendar year at $517m whereas the new MRTEs estimate it at $1,064m.