Tourism yield: Analysing tourism satellite accounts for measures of sector performance and business benchmarks

Abstract

Establishing the economic contribution of visitor activities to national or local gross domestic product (GDP) has been the primary use of Tourism Satellite Accounts (TSA). Visitor consumption is distributed throughout numerous sectors of the economy where expenditure, value added and the financial yield of constituent enterprises provides a mechanism for comparing the performance of tourism's characteristic industries against the rest of the economy. The paper submits that measures of economic performance at sector level and financial yield at enterprise level are more reliable indicators of tourism's sustainability within an economy than volumetric measures such as visitor consumption or income. The concept of tourism yield is revisited, defined and measured in terms of enterprise-level economic performance. Furthermore, this paper outlines a methodology based on economic value measurements for determining the relative performance of sectors contributing to a TSA