This case study covers the Canadian Tourism Activity Tracker, which was developed during the COVID-19 pandemic as an experimental tool, combining data from multiple areas of tourism into an index to represent tourism activity relative to the 2019 pre-pandemic levels. This work shows how administrative data and modern tools can be used to provide timely tourism indicators and in the event of disruption to traditional surveys and for general use in tourism activity reporting.
The Canadian Tourism Activity Tracker
Abstract
The Canadian Tourism Activity Tracker was developed during the pandemic as an experimental tool. It combined data from multiple areas of tourism, including count of entry survey, passenger and aircraft movement, food sales, hotel occupancy and more, into an index to represent tourism activity relative to the 2019 pre-pandemic period at the country and provincial level. This product shows how administrative data and modern tools can be used to provide timely tourism indicators and in the event of disruption to traditional surveys and for general use in tourism activity reporting.
The Tracker’s main users included other government agencies, provincial governments, private tourism agencies, and Canadians interested in tourism recovery from COVID-19. The data were used as an overall indicator of recovery from the pandemic alongside official national statistics such as inbound and domestic tourism estimates as well as border crossings and tourism share of GDP.
The data were released monthly. Future work may include the integration of additional administrative data, reviewing the model, updating the reference period from 2019 to month to month and year over year measurements, and introducing a higher level of granularity. The tracker is no longer being updated.
The design of the Tracker took place in January 2021 arising from a hackathon organised by the department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development. The goal of the hackathon was to re-use administrative data sources and make use of modern software practices used in citizen developed projects, to fill an identified data gap resulting from the pandemic’s effect on tourism survey activities. The development and release of the project took place over a 6-week period, starting in March 2021 and culminating in the first monthly data release in May 2021 (which included a year’s worth of historical data).
The development of the Tracker consisted of two teams internal to Statistics Canada: tourism and methodology. The tourism team used its own in-house expertise including subject matter expertise; technical implementation of the data gathering; modelling; and orchestration of the Tracker scripts. The methodology team served as consultants for the modelling in this project. Following the initial development, the tourism team is responsible for the ongoing maintenance and subject matter expertise. The total cost for maintaining the Tracker was approximately CAD 40 000 per year in salaried expenses. The funding came from the Statistics Canada base budget.
The Tracker consists of two sub-indexes aggregated into one: a domestic activity index and an inbound activity index. The domestic sub-index is calculated using data sources measuring Canadian residents’ tourism activity, while the inbound sub-index is calculated using data sources measuring non-Canadian residents’ tourism activity. Table 1 and Table 2 show the inputs for each sub-index.
The two sub-indexes are combined to create a composite index (the headline Canadian Tourism Activity Tracker number). Statistics Canada’s National Travel Survey (domestic) and Visitor Travel Survey (inbound) are used to calculate the weights to combine the indexes, using 2019 reference year values to establish the relative importance of each input. This implicitly assumes that the 2019 reference year is representative of normal tourism activity, and that the composition of tourism activity from 2019 is a good baseline for post-pandemic tourism. The team will re-evaluate this assumption should work on the tracker resume. The three indexes (domestic, inbound, combined) were published in a monthly release through The Daily, the official Statistics Canada publication vehicle. Future work on the tracker may include updates to improve the index’s relevance in a post-pandemic tourism context.
Source: Statistics Canada
Source: Statistics Canada
The Tracker served not only to aggregate administrative tourism data but also to promote modern methods and technology at Statistics Canada. All scripts related to the Tracker are written in either R or Python, and the running of all Tracker-related scripts was automated by a single pipeline written in Python. This enabled Statistics Canada staff to spend less time on generating the data and dedicate more to higher value tasks such as data verification rather than manually running code.
Project management and version control are managed in Gitlab. Gitlab is a collaborative tool that ensures that issues and updates are directly associated to code changes, facilitating active documentation and discussion and promoting transparency and accountability for changes. This made it easier to onboard new staff and to share and discuss methodology and best practices.
The Tracker was received positively, and was quickly integrated into policy and ministerial briefings by major governmental stakeholders. Stakeholders advocate for continued production of these data despite a post-pandemic context change. The impacts of methodological choices were communicated to stakeholders through the website in the product itself and Statistics Canada’s integrated metadata database. The lesson learned is to integrate a longer-term view during the initial design phase. For the Tracker this could have been done by designing the model with a flexible base period in mind.
The timeliness of the index was a key factor in stakeholder adoption, as the Tracker provided timelier and more frequent insight into tourism activity than any of Statistics Canada’s official statistics on tourism. Although the Tracker was initially developed to fill the data gap left by pandemic-caused survey disruptions, its positive reception shows that more timely products, such as this one and/or flash estimates can be an important part of tourism data and have significant standalone value.
The development was remarkably swift, and an agile approach capitalised on existing developer resources. A key factor was the reuse of existing data, as no procurement or survey planning meant a quick time to publication. Future development of the Tracker will continue to use these data sources, but potentially also alternative sources of data such as transaction and mobile positioning data.
Modern tools and methods, including R, Python, and Git, made project documentation, management and sharing easier. DevOps practices facilitate greater observability, reliability, and reproducibility, which makes the Tracker project a scalable template for other work within Statistics Canada.
For further information please contact:
Rebecca Taves, Section Chief Tourism Data Science, Statistics Canada, tourism@statcan.gc.ca
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