Origins / Objective
The European Travel Monitor® has been continuously surveying the most important data on outbound travel behavior from all European countries since 1988. In 1995, the European Travel Monitor® was expanded to the World Travel Monitor® to cover all the important overseas markets (USA, Canada, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Japan, China, India, etc.). Data is collected by the architects of the Monitor or by means of working cooperations in the various countries. Today (2013), the World Travel Monitor® chronicles about 90% of all international travel flows. Conceived and realized by IPK International, the surveys have the objective of tracking all outbound travel of at least one overnight stay, regardless of travel motive. Apart from holiday trips, business trips and all other private trips (e.g. visiting friends or relatives) are also recorded.
The driving impetus behind establishing this information system – initially for Germany (German Travel Monitor®) and Europe – was the fact that it was not possible for decision-makers in the tourism field, based on the information available to them up to that point in time, to gain an overview of the European market or any overseas markets (in the form of a database enabling a direct comparison of aspects such as the volume and structure of outbound trips taken by the Germans, Americans, British, Russians, Chinese, etc.). While various surveys and official statistics were available prior to the introduction of the World Travel Monitor® / European Travel Monitor®, the individual datasets were virtually impossible to compare because there were major dissimilarities among the samplings as well as among the survey methods used in the individual countries.
The World Travel Monitor® / European Travel Monitor® are cooperative partnership studies. Main contracting entities include national and regional tourist boards, tourism and economics ministries, tour operators, international hotel chains, advertising agencies, consulting firms, etc.
Read more about this topic: World Travel Monitor
Famous quotes containing the words origins and/or objective:
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)