The Albanian Prime Minister, in a recent Council of Ministers meeting, thanked the Minister of Tourism for the excellent results achieved because, according to UNWTO (United Nations World Tourism Organization) data, Albania is the first country in the world for the amount of tourism expenditure per single international tourist arrived, as underlined by an article on The Economist website (
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9570468&CFID=16761097&CFTOKEN=45436406). Every foreign tourist during his stay in Albania spend an average of 17,500 USD! A very good performance or wrong data? A political influence in statistics production or a simple mistake? I will answer these legitimate questions that many Albanian people raised recently (
http://www.peshkupauje.com/shqiperia-fiton-me-shume-per-turist/2007/08/01/).
Since last February I noticed this strange data, published by UNWTO and the Albanian Institute of Statistics (INSTAT): in 2005, international tourist arrivals were 46,000 while international visitors were 748,000 and the tourism expenditure was 880 millions USD. I briefly explain these concepts in few words. A tourist is a traveller that stays at least one night in Albania, while the category of visitors include the tourists and the same-day visitors (also called excursionists). Tourism expenditure include payment made by all the visitors (tourists and excursionists).
According to these data, Albania receives a big amount of excursionists and very few tourists, but it gets a lot of money from them. Is this can be reasonable? Not really... so I started my investigations and I talked with people from the Ministry of Tourism, INSTAT and the Bank of Albania (responsible for the data on expenditure).
At the end I found a simple explanation: INSTAT gave the wrong number to UNWTO: 46000 were tourists that stayed in registered hotels, but this number was transmitted to UNWTO as number of tourist arrivals, while it is only a small fraction of the tourist population. The real number of tourist arrivals is unknown, even though often it is confused with the number of visitors. There are then other problems more technical, like the criterion of residence to use instead of nationality, so also the number of 748,000 is not correct. Or the mistake done by dividing the tourism expenditure for the number of tourists instead of visitors. But I will not bother you more. I am writing a document about all these issues and I hope the involved institutions will take it in consideration and improve the data production. It was surprising how for years nobody seemed to notice this mistake, and institutions like UNWTO or specialized magazines like The Economist accepted these data!
