As an organization whose primary mission is to sell a dream, the importance of HVCB as a tourism research organization was often overlooked. How-ever, HVCB’s research—or more accurately, data collection and generation
—made a huge contribution to Hawaii.
Not many years after the founding of the Hawaii Promotion Committee (around 1911), it began compiling fi rst-class ship passenger statistics. Until the data collection program was transferred to the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism in 1998 under the directive of Act 156, the HVB was noted for producing some of the best tourism statistics in the world. The 1973 Temporary Visitor Industry Council observed that one of the reasons why Hawaii’s tourism statistics were regarded as being so good was because everyone else’s was so bad.²¹ But that was still early in the evolution of HVB’s research program; tourism research at the bureau would become increasingly sophisticated and more comprehensive in coverage.
To be sure, there are defi nite advantages to being an island destination when it comes to counting visitor arrivals, since just about everyone com-ing to Hawaii has to come on a commercial ship or plane; passenger sta-tistics are tabulated by the carriers and, in the case of foreign visitors, also by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Even if not everyone leaving a ship or a plane is a tourist, the total number of passengers provides a reliable control count of the potential number of visitors. A supplemental survey of disembarking passengers to ascertain the typical proportion of visitors, transit passengers, returning residents, and immigrants allowed the bureau to identify how many of the disembarking passengers are tour-ists.²² By comparison, some destinations have to estimate their visitor ar-rivals by tabulating vehicle counts on major highways. Las Vegas uses hotel occupancy data to estimate its visitor count. One small community val-iantly tries to estimate the number of tourists by counting the number of times toilets are fl ushed by measuring pressure changes in the community’s water system. Having a geographic advantage is not enough to produce quality statistics, however; it was still necessary for the bureau to make a commitment to fund a quality research program. Airlines must also agree to provide data on disembarking passengers, access to their customers, and even have their own staff hand out and collect surveys on their planes.
Hotels must agree to distribute diaries to selected guests so they can keep a running tally of their daily spending. A lot of people and businesses co-operate to make it work.
Throughout its history, the bureau made a conscientious eff ort to pro-duce the highest quality tourism statistics its shoestring research budgets would allow. Beginning in 1950, the HVB formed a Research Committee
“to direct the collection, dissemination and improvement of visitor statis-tics.” The Research Committee met regularly (several times) each year. The
members, except for the HVB staff , served pro bono and were drawn from the diverse expertise available in the community. HVB’s tourism data not only supported the bureau’s marketing program, it was an invaluable re-source to the State and county governments in economic and tax revenue forecasting and for planning purposes. The public benefi ts of HVB’s re-search program spilled over beyond government work, as its massive data resources were also shared with serious researchers, both in business and in academia. To teach its largely small business members how to use its data, the Research Committee occasionally conducted research workshops.
Table 5-1 provides a time line of HVCB’s statistical output.
As the saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fi x it.” Why, then, was the HVCB’s research program transferred to the Department of Business, Eco-nomic Development and Tourism? To be sure, not everyone in the industry was happy about the bureau’s research program. Some complained that the bureau did not collect data for their own (narrowly defi ned) industry.
Others griped if the sales trend for their company did not agree with the overall trend indicated by the HVCB’s industry-wide data, the HVCB data must be wrong. Some people were concerned that the bureau might have the incentive to collect and present data that would make itself look good.
However, the members of the Research Committee came from outside the bureau and served pro bono. From my own experience serving on the Re-search Committee, I am convinced that the members were not corruptible.
Who could corrupt the legendary State statistician, Robert Schmitt? There were concerns that research might be shortchanged at the bureau when push came to shove in the competition for money between research and marketing; when that time comes, some parts of the research program less valuable to the bureau’s marketing program but essential for State planning might be sacrifi ced. For example, the HVCB may not value information (contained in its passenger surveys) on the number of in-migrants arriving from the U.S. mainland to Hawaii, but the State and the counties do. In time, HVCB’s tourism data became more valuable to the community than they were to its own Marketing Department; indeed, at times the marketing people in the bureau were criticized for not paying more attention to their own research. Thus, many in the community felt that the State government with its deeper pocket could do a better job in the long run by taking it over.
For the bureau, the transfer was a mixed blessing because creating original data was a highly labor intensive activity requiring a lot of (though low-paid) data entry and processing employees, which demanded some expla-nation whenever lawmakers—and even bureau administrators—questioned
(about) HPC begins compilation of fi rst-class ship passenger statistics.
Split passenger arrivals between those in transit and those coming specifi cally to Hawaii.
(about) HTB begins monthly and annual reports.
Passenger statistics are refi ned to distinguish between tourists and residents.
Initiates survey of visitor expenditures.
The Basic Data Survey (BDS) and Visitor Reaction (i.e., Satisfaction)–Expenditure Survey programs begin.
The use of eastbound and westbound visitor classifi cations begins.
Begins offi cial counts of convention visitors.
Annual survey of Visitor Plant Inventory begins.
The frequency of the Visitor Expenditure Report is increased to triennial and in becomes an annual publication.
Survey of Japanese visitor expenditures begins.
Defi nition of “visitor” changed to include nonresidents staying at least overnight in Hawaii.
The Visitor Expenditure Survey includes an additional category for visitor spending related to meetings, conventions, and incentive travel (MCI). In addition, greater use of random sampling is initiated. Immigration and Naturalization Service reports become the basis for eastbound visitor counts and country of origin.
A new basic data survey design is implemented that can be optically scanned. This enables all the passenger survey forms to be used instead of a fraction of them.
Act transfers the offi cial state visitor statistics program to the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism (DBEDT).
Source: dbedt (February ), p. ; First Hawaiian Bank (June ), p. .
why the research department had so many employees. Finally stripped of its data collection responsibility, HVCB could conduct more market re-search—fi nding out what’s going on in tourism in the rest of the world and identifying changes in market trends—things it didn’t do enough of before the transfer.