The Seychelles Ministry of Tourism, Civil Aviation, Ports and Marine has entered into an agreement with the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) to strengthen the system of tourism statistics with the goal of developing a Tourism Satellite Account (TSA).

This followed an assessment of the national tourism statistical system of the Seychelles conducted in 2017 by UNWTO, where a number of gaps were identified.

The objective of the co-operation is to establish an efficient and dynamic system for the processing of tourism statistics in the Seychelles, with the TSA expected to be implemented over a three-year period, from 2019 to 2021. Implementation commenced in the second week of January.

As part of the initial ‘mission’, a workshop was held on January 17 where an overview of tourism statistics was provided to tourism stakeholders, detailing the concepts, classification and definitions of each part that goes into successfully developing a TSA.

Principal Secretary for Tourism, Anne Lafortune, said in her opening remarks at the workshop that the basis for making the project a reality was the provision of accurate, reliable statistics by all stakeholders. This will in turn “foster accuracy, integrity and consistency in Government decision making”.

UNWTO shared the results of the first two weeks of the mission, which saw the country’s first Visitor Cruise survey being successfully developed in collaboration with the National Bureau of Statistics, along with various adjustments being made to the pre-existing Airport Visitor Survey.

Stakeholders were further given an overview of inbound, domestic and outbound tourism and its impact on the country’s balance of payment and GDP.