See Regulation 692/2011, Delegated Regulation 2019/1681 and Methodological Manual for Tourism Statistics

Some of the main concepts used in the survey are:

• Tourism trip: travel to a main destination outside the usual environment of the traveller, for less than a year but including at least one overninght stay, for any reason other than to be employed by a resident entity in the country or place visited.
• Usual environment (trips): municipality (LAU2) of residence

Because of operational and methodological reasons, every trip outside the usual place of residence of the interviewee including an overnight stay and for less than a year is collected in the questionnaire. Those trips falling outside the scope of tourism (frequent trips to the place of work or study or those with the purpose to work in an entity resident in the place visited) are identified by their purpose and not taken into account in the estimation of tourism trips (not included in the microdata file sent to fulfill the regulation), as it is requested in the EU regulation 692/2011.

• Same-day visit: journey out of the usual environment without overnight stay. In the case of same-day visits the definition of usual environment is directly applied as specified in the regulation.
• Usual environment (same-day visits): means the geographical area, though not necessarily a contiguous one, within which an individual conducts his regular life routines and shall be determined on the basis of the following criteria: the crossing of administrative borders (municipality) or the distance from the place of usual residence, the duration of the visit (>3h in the place(s) visited), the frequency of the visit (less than once per week in a period of 6 months), the purpose of the visit. These criteria are applied as recommended in the Methodological Manual for Tourism Statistics.
• Trip expenditure: amount paid for the acquisition of consumption goods and services, as well as valuables, for own use or to give away, for and during tourism trips. It includes expenditures by visitors themselves, as well as expenses that are paid for or reimbursed by others.

Participation in tourism: the individual.
Tourism trips: the tourism trip with at least one overnight stay made by the individual.
Same-day visits: the SDV made by the individual.

Participation in tourism: All residents aged 15 or over in main family households all over the Spanish territory

Tourism trips: All tourism trips of at least one overnight stay made outside the usual environment by the residents aged 15 or over in main family households all over the Spanish territory.

Same-day visits: All outbound SDV made outside the usual environment by the residents aged 15 or over in main family households all over the Spanish territory.

The population subject to direct observation is the population aged 15 years or over resident in main family households all over the Spanish territory.

Nevertheless, indirect information is gathered about persons under the age of 15 that allow to make estimations of the trips made for the whole resident population: number of household members under 15 years old participating in the trip is collected for each trip. Trips made by people under 15 years old with a household member (Th) can then be estimated as well as their main characteristics. The sociodemographic profile of the visitor under 15 is not investigated.

Besides, every household reports the number of trips made by their members under 15 without the participation of any adult (15 or over) of the household (Ta). This information completes the number of trips of the population under 15 years old. Aggregated tables on the number and type of trips are calculated assuming that these last type of trips (Ta) are mainly of the same nature of those made with other household member (Th). Inflation factors are calculated at cell level and applied to every trip in which a household member under 15 had participated.

It is noted that the data sent to Eurostat refer only to the population aged 15 years or older. Due to the estimation process applied to the trips made by the population under 15 years old, no microdata file is available to be sent.

Information on same-day visits and on participation in tourism is collected only for resident population aged 15 or over.

As it was detailed in section 3.4.2, because of operational and methodological reasons, every trip outside the usual place of residence of the interviewee including an overnight stay and for less than a year is collected in the questionnaire. That includes trips that could be classified as trips made in the usual environment (frequent trips to the place of work or study or those with the purpose to work in an entity resident in the place visited). Nevertheless those trips falling outside the scope of tourism are identified by their purpose and not taken into account in the estimation of tourism trips (not included in the microdata file sent to fulfill the regulation), as it is requested in the EU regulation 692/2011.

Finally it is noted that domestic same-day visits have been collected and processed for the reference year 2017, but no information has been sent to Eurostat according to the regulation 692/2011.

2015

2015

2015

2015

Information available from 2015 (a methodological revision of the survey was carried out with 2015 as the first year of reference). Data obtained with the previous survey methodology (FAMILITUR) can be checked at the TURESPAÑA website (https://aplicaciones.tourspain.es/DatosHistoricos/DatosHistoricos/Familitur) and at the tourism site of Eurostat.

Regulation 692/2011

Regulation 1051/2011

Delegated Regulation 2019/1681

This statistical operation is included in the Spanish National Statistics Plan 2021-2024.

The overall assessment of the data is good. Non response is an issue which affects most household surveys, but in this case non-response rates both at unit or item level are under the average of similar surveys conducted by the NSI. The population frame is continuously updated and has a good coverage. Quarterly data are disseminated before the end of the next quarter and quite detailed microdata files are publicly available on the website the same day of the publication allowing the expert users to do their own analysis and modelling.

The main difficulty this kind of surveys have to deal with is the lack of efficiency of the samples: only a percentage of the population makes tourism trips, this percentage depending on the country (region) and the time of the year. Thus, to obtain a good sample of trips (which are the last observation unit), much bigger samples of people are needed, with the subsequent costs. As an example, in 2017 in the Spanish survey, approximately the 24% of the sample have travelled during the period of reference (the two previous months).

To deal with this problem, as the population frame for the Resident Travel Survey comes from the Continous Household Survey, it is used the additional information provided by this survey to assign to every household a propensity score to travel calculated through a logistic regression model including information on the members of the household, the household itself and other characteristics of the neighbourhood. Thus, more prone to travel households are sampled, increasing the trips sample and descreasing the estimation variance. It is stated that the weighting factors are processed in order not to introduce bias in the estimations due to the use of this procedure.

Editing and imputation programs have been optimized in order to reduce the survey processing time.

See: Regulation 692/2011

The main users are the administration organisms with tourist expertise both nationally and on an autonomous or municipal scale, as well as the statistical institutes or offices of the autonomous communities. Also the national accounts department in the National Statistics Institute and the Bank of Spain use the survey data to compile their outputs. Among the main operators of the private sector there is also a great interest in the national tourist behaviour.

Compliant with the requirements of Regulation on tourism statistics 692/2011, Delegated Regulation 2019/1681, as well as recommendations laid down in the Methodological Manual for tourism statistics.

26427605

0.96

2959404

3.18

138191592

1.52

124602722

1.62

13588870

2.67

131651380

1.56

6540212

4.98

46519094

1.73

78083628

2.22

43417322122

1.49

12220089275

1.75

The coefficients of variation have been computed using Jackknife techniques

For this survey a sample of Georeferenced Address Framework (MDG) is selected every six months.

For this survey a sample of Georeferenced Address Framework (MDG) is selected every six months.

7245

149555

53076

2968

8

2505

58557

39,15%

50,12%

35,75%

Methods used for minimising unit non-response: Interviewees are called several times in order to reduce the non-response rate. If the person cannot perform the interview when he is contacted, an appointment is fixed for another day which suits to the interviewee better. In addition, those interviewees not contacted in the first interview are visited by survey agents in order to perform the interview by CAPI and collect the phone for successive interviews. The CAWI method allows the respondent to answer the questionnaire in a different schedule.

Methods used for dealing with unit non-response: Calibration techniques are applied during the processing data in order to reduce the bias introduced by the non-response.

Regarding the item-response, the electronic questionnaire only allows the expenditure variables to be left empty (non-response). The non-response rates for some of these items are:

• Expenditure on package tour: 12.85%
• Expenditure on transport: 17.29%
• Expenditure on accommodation: 16.53%. In this case, it has been stated that if trips at company's expense and trips for medical purposes (not easy to estimate the price of one hospital bed) are removed, the non-response rates decrease to 14.43%
• Expenditure in cafes and restaurants: 12.08%
• Expenditure on durable and valuable goods: 33.60%
• Expenditure on leisure activities: 13.43%

The percentage of informants that provide all the expenditure amounts is 81.29%.

Non-response is imputed by means of the use of a model for the expenditure. Depending on the type of expenditure (accommodation, transport, etc.) a regression model or a moving average at cell level is applied to impute a value for each register.

- Coverage errors:

For this survey a sample of Georeferenced Address Framework (MDG) is selected every six months.

178

87

87

-22

-22

-22

Since February 2015 this survey is under the responsability of the National Statistics Institute (before it was developed by the Spanish Tourism Institute, TurEspaña). A methodological revision was carried out at the same time, so there is a break in series in 2015.

Since February 2015 this survey is under the responsibility of the National Statistics Institute (before it was developed by the Spanish Tourism Institute, TurEspaña). A methodological revision was carried out at the same time, so there is a break in series in 2015. This issue has been managed estimating and publishing annual variation rates for the main magnitudes (trips, overnight stays, average duration of the trips, total expenditure, average expenditure per person and average daily expenditure per person). These annual rates have been estimated for the months and quarters of 2015, as well as for the whole year, and are referred to the whole population and to all kind of trips, including those which could be classified as made in the usual environment (check section 3.6.2).

Since February 2015 this survey is under the responsability of the National Statistics Institute (before it was developed by the Spanish Tourism Institute, TurEspaña). A methodological revision was carried out at the same time, so there is a break in series in 2015. This issue has been managed estimating and publishing annual variation rates for the same-day visits. These annual rates have been estimated for the months and quarters of 2015, as well as for the whole year.

Survey

Encuesta de turismo de residentes

Residents Travel Survey

Every six months

The sampling frame is the list of households from the Georeferenced Address Framework (MDG).

During the whole statistical process of the CHS, a control process is carried out of non-sampling errors, with an application to manage the information that includes a control system of the coverage of what is received via the different collection and incidence monitoring channels.

The non reponse in the CHS, due to refusals and non contacts is approximately 15% of the selected households. Nevertheless, this frame is enough to reach the theoretical sample size and allocation of the RTS. Previously to the selection of the sample a study with the CHS by strata is made.

156800

31192

144558

90998

13309

84447

The sampling frame is the list of households from the Georeferenced Address Framework (MDG). This frame is updated every six months.

This enables to:

1. Improve the efficiency of the sampling design: a logistic regression model is used to assign a propensity score to the households in the frame trying to approximate their probability of travelling. This model considers the characteristics of the households and household members previously collected in the CHS, which allows the sub-sample of the Residents Travel Survey (RTS) to be stratified.
2. Have the phone numbers of the households to be able to conduct CATI interviews.
3. Improve the methods of correction of non-response.

The sampling design of the RTS is a three-stage stratified random sampling. 

The first stage units are the census sections, the second stage units are the dwellings, and a  person aged 15 or over has been selected within each dwelling. The stratification criterion in the first stage was the size of the municipality to which the section belongs. In both cases, a variable is used as a substratification criterion to define the household's propensity to travel.
The selected persons collaborate three times in alternate months over six months, leave the sample one semester, and are interviewed another three times during the following semester.

Every household is interviewed three months along 6 months, in alternate months, leaves the sample other six months and is interviewed again three other times.

More information is available in the survey methodology: http://www.ine.es/en/daco/daco42/etr/etr_metodologia_en.pdf

Data is collected on a monthly basis. Surveys are concentrated on the first weeks of the month, but surveys continue throughout the whole month.

Most of interviews are conducted by telephone (CATI) except for those persons not contacted in first interview that will be interviewed in person (CAPI). The interviewees can decide if they want to answer the questionnaire by computer (CAWI) except in the first interview.

See annexes

See annexes

Not available (Spanish version in annex)

Allowed when the survey respondent is under 18 years old or when he has some kind of disability

10

10-15

Throughout the data collection process, the personnel in charge of this task carry out inspections of the interviews conducted. The electronic survey includes automatic coherence controls for the information, which, subsequently, is subject to a centralised validating and editing process.

A series of processes are applied to the validated data that allow the improvement in the quality of data. These processes are the following:

• Detection and treatment of outliers
• Imputation of uncollected variables in trips not selected for their thorough investigation
• Memory effect analysis and correction
• Computation of raising factors
• Computation of coefficients to estimate results for the whole population (It is noted that just persons aged 15 or over are interviewed, and the travel information on minors is asked to them)
• Calibration of the raising factors
• Expenditure variables modelling

These processes are thoroughly described in the methodology of the survey: http://www.ine.es/en/daco/daco42/etr/etr_metodologia_en.pdf