Commercial Accommodation Monitor Methodology
Last updated:
April 2008
Survey Purpose
The Commercial Accommodation Monitor (CAM) provides regional data on the supply and demand of the accommodation sector. It provides statistics on guest nights, international/domestic guests, number of establishments, capacity, occupancy rates and employee counts each month.
Survey Type
The CAM is a census (rather than a sample survey) of all mainstream commercial accommodation establishments of certain size (see Survey Coverage). Respondent participation is compulsory as it is collected under the Statistics Act 1975.
Survey Coverage
Survey forms are sent out monthly by Statistics New Zealand to accommodation establishments (around 4,000 in March 2008) chosen from Statistics New Zealand’s Business Frame (BF). The following five groups of establishments are surveyed (see also Classifications and Definitions).
- Hotels (includes both hotels and resorts)
- Motels (includes motor inns, motels and apartments)
- Hosted (includes private hotels, guest houses and B&Bs)
- Backpacker/hostels
- Caravan parks/camping grounds.
These establishments must also be registered for GST and have a turnover of a least NZ$30,000 per annum. Therefore, those small establishments that are not GST registered or earn below the threshold level are not included in the survey. A large proportion of these are hosted/B&Bs.
Some establishments may also be overlooked by the Business Frame if they are involved in the accommodation industry as a secondary commercial activity, for example, farm-stay tourist accommodation within the main farm business. Consequently there is under coverage of small accommodation providers.
Field Work
The survey is conducted each month using a questionnaire form that is completed by the respondent and returned back to Statistics New Zealand. After the information is collected, Statistics New Zealand processes and outputs data for Regional Tourism Organisation (RTO) and Territorial Local Authority areas in Excel pivot table format.
Commercial Accommodation Monitor (CAM) reports are also produced for RTO Areas, with sub-area information provided for some larger RTO areas. Reports may be obtained from the individual RTOs.
Survey Responsibility
Data collection, processing and first information release are undertaken by Statistics New Zealand. The Ministry of Tourism funds the survey and provides input to the survey design and development. Both agencies disseminate comprehensive survey results on their respective websites. See Statistics NZ and the Ministry of Tourism.
Survey History
The CAM began in July 1996. The survey was initially funded jointly by the Ministry of Tourism and Regional Tourism Organisations. Since July 2002 the Ministry of Tourism has been solely funding the survey following a cabinet decision to transfer the responsibility for all core tourism data to the Ministry of Tourism.
From November 2007, the survey question on "origin of guest" has been simplified to "International /Domestic" instead of more detailed origins. This is the first stage of changes being made following a review of the Accommodation Survey, which aims to balance the need for high-quality information against the need to reduce respondent load.
This means that information on domestic and international guest nights is available on a monthly basis rather than every third month. Previous information on 'origin of guest breakdown by country or New Zealand Regions' is not available from November 2007 onward.
This change has improved of response rate to the "origin of guest" question, from between 55% and 60% before the change to 67% in March 2008.
Figures for those establishments that did not respond to the origin question have been imputed (see Non-response imputation). Reduction in the need for imputation helps improve data quality, especially for regional statistics and/or statistics by accommodation type.
For more information on the Commercial Accommodation Monitor, go to the Statistics NZ website.
See also
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