About

Summary

The Ministry of Tourism had developed a National Tourism Information System (NATIS) for the storage and retrieval of a broad range of tourism-related data.  It was the intention of the Ministry of Tourism to develop an additional information system for each of the 10 regions in Ghana, with each regional tourist office being responsible for the collection and updating of their own database.  The aim was to distribute the task of data collection to the regions, and for these data to be transmitted back to the central database, NATIS, in Accra.

Acorn were contracted by the Ministry of Tourism in Ghana to undertake a review of this proposed strategy and recommend the steps to move it forward, develop the devolved system, and put in place an action plan for all stakeholders to work with the new system.

Our Approach

Our approach to the study was to work closely with all stakeholders, but in particular the Ministry of Tourism and the regional tourism offices, to understand the data they were collecting and the data they needed, and ensure that the new system could deliver the information required in a timely way.

It was recommended that the database be structured so that it collected and processed three specific groups of data: the tourism product (businesses and attractions), visitor arrivals and their characteristics, and accommodation operational statistics.

Outcome

The NATIS and RETIS (Regional Tourism Information System) database network was established as a result of this study, providing Ghana with a powerful and forward-thinking way of collecting, storing and disseminating tourism information.  This devolution of data collection to the regions was subsequently adopted by many countries, and inspired the development of Acorn’s T-Stats online tourism database system that is now in use by many destinations around the world.