Domestic Travel Survey Methodology
Last updated:
May 2008
Survey Purpose
The Domestic Travel Survey (DTS) provides accurate, quarterly information on the number and type of trips, characteristics, behaviour and expenditure of domestic visitors.
In particular;
- To measure the amount of expenditure of domestic visitors,
- To determine the activities domestic visitors participate in, the transport and accommodation types used, and places visited,
- To provide data for determining tourism expenditure in the Tourism Satellite Account,
- To provide demographic information about domestic visitors and their reasons for travelling,
- To provide data about residents who haven't travelled in New Zealand recently and their reasons for not travelling.
Survey Type
The Domestic Travel Study is a sample survey of approximately 15,000 people aged 15 years and older per year.
Sampling
The Domestic Travel Survey is a stratified random sample of households. Within each household an individual aged 15 years or older is randomly selected to participate in the survey.
Telephone interviewing is used for the DTS and household telephone numbers are randomly selected from the white pages. Interviews are carried out according to pre-specified quotas for age, sex and region of origin.
Field Work
The process of data collection for the DTS takes place continuously throughout the year. The DTS interviews are conducted over the telephone using CATI (Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing). Information is collected for domestic overnight trips undertaken in the last four weeks and domestic day trips undertaken in the last week.
Weighting
The sample is weighted to represent the usually resident New Zealand population aged 15 years and older. Post-stratification is used to adjust for known discrepancies between the sample and the population and ensures that the weights sum to known population totals from Statistics New Zealand population demography statistics.
The trip data is weighted to represent domestic day and overnight trips undertaken over a 12 month period.
Survey Responsibility
From 1 July 2008 the Ministry of Tourism will be fully responsible for all processes of the Domestic Travel Survey and only the data collection will be outsourced. The Ministry will analyse and disseminates the survey results.
Survey History
The DTS has been conducted in New Zealand since 1983. There was no survey during the period 1991 to 1998.
Up to 1989-90 the DTS measured overnight trips only. For 1999-00 the Foundation for Research Science and Technology (FRST) provided funding to develop a new domestic travel survey which included data on day trips (as well as overnight trips).
In 2001, the Office of Tourism and Sport (now the Ministry of Tourism) secured government funding for ongoing collection of domestic travel statistics. The survey was conducted by Consumer Link Ltd, with data analysis by Gravitas Research and Strategy Ltd.
The Nielsen Company have been responsible for running the DTS from September 2002 to June 2008. From July 2008 the Ministry will directly manage the DTS and the data collection will be outsourced.
See Also
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