Project: Indicators for the Monitoring and Forecasts of Tourism Activity (IMPACTUR) - 1st phase
Team: Fernando Perna (coord.), Maria João Custódio, Pedro Gouveia, Pedro Laginha, Ricardo Baptista, Célia Ramos, Américo Caetano, Paulo Rodrigues.
Contractor: Direcção-Geral do Turismo (Portugal’s Tourism)
Execution time limit: 2004/2006

Communications:

Name: IMPACTUR's Methodology (in Portuguese)
Date: 17th March 2005
Local: Direcção-Geral do Turismo (Portugal’s Tourism), Lisbon

Name: IMPACTUR Public Presentation (in Portuguese)
Date: 28th September 2006
Local: Economics and Innovation Ministry, Lisbon

Summary:

The IMPACTUR indicators system aims to create a regular analysis indicators and forecast of tourism sector behaviour as an economic activity. These indicators intend to be scientifically rigorous, interpreted, subject to put in practice in useful time and progressively comprehensive regarding variables and territorial cover. Its functionality is an investment of Algarve’s University through the International Centre of Territory and Tourism Research, in the way of continuing the objective of developing scientific knowledge about tourism and appeal to the new technologies of information and management as supportive instrument to the processes of tourism planning and decision.

The IMPACTUR is an innovative tool on the national scenery of statistical information about tourism. It is based on a technologically complex output process though oriented for the fluent utilization and communication in electronic format, territorially specialized and updated. The reception of the primary inputs through Portugal’s Tourism, National Statistics Institute, Bank of Portugal, Airports of Portugal (ANA,S.A.) or other alternative resources properly identified, finds in IMPACTUR a specific software of qualitative and quantitative analysis, by encoding and adapting United Nations World Tourism Organization’s methodological principles and by its own creation processes.

The output intends to guarantee the online availability, regular and regionalized by NUT II of annual, quarterly, and monthly reports, risk analysis routines and destinations competitiveness, as well as regional forecast modules of issuing markets, providing the sector with simple but comprehensive information, complex in its output process but linear in its interpretation.