About

Summary

Visit England is responsible for collecting and organising tourism statistics in England relating to domestic trips, accommodation utilisation, visits to attractions and visitor satisfaction amongst others.  These data are collected at a number of different geographical levels.  At the NUTS 1 level, there are 10 regions in England, such as the North East, South West, and London.  These are defined by the Office of National Statistics.  Below this level, there are Sub-Regions (NUTS 2) and Detailed Sub-Regions (NUTS 3).  There are also Counties and Local Authorities which have a more political definition.

Visit England commissioned this study for the development of an online database to store a wide range of tourism statistics from their data collection and surveys, as well as those from other bodies, into a system that could be sliced in different geographical ways, using the NUTS system or by Local Authority or County.  Acorn was commissioned to design and programme the system, upload five years of historical data, and maintain the system for three years.

Our Approach

We utilised our T-Stats online database system as the basic framework for the development of the Visit England database.  Relevant data was identified relating to the following categories: accommodation, attractions, domestic tourism, inbound tourism, employment, DMO performance, visitor satisfaction, destination information, and economic performance.  The source of these data was from Visit England, the Office for National Statistics and the British Destinations Organisation.

The level of granularity of the data was monthly where possible, but otherwise annual, and each data point was attached to one or more geographical locations as follows: local authority, county, NUTS 1, NUTS 2, NUTS 3, International Passenger Survey County, Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP), British Destinations membership location, or one of a number of special regions (such as national parks).  This approach to the design of the system allowed maximum flexibility when users interrogated it, and for the generation of reports.

Outcome

The final system was delivered to Visit England as an online database which allowed them to manage access through a user name and password system.  The system provided the facility for users to interrogate the database from the perspective of a geographical region (such as a country) or from the perspective of a data type (such as domestic tourism trips) and to extract the data into trend reports showing data for the previous five years.

It also provided users with an option to select any local authority in England and automatically generate a single report that contained all the tourism data about that area for the most recent year.