Tourism contribution figure. None of the three states what it includes, what period it covers, or whether the money stayed. A footprint figure is only useful when it carries its own definitions, and it is only defensible when it is kept separate from impact. Reference data is published by UN Tourism.
Ask a mayor, a tourism board, and a chamber of commerce what tourism is worth to the same city and you will get three different numbers. Each is probably right on its own terms. None of them states its terms.
One counts visitor spend at the point of purchase. One counts the sectors that depend on it. One counts the jobs. None says what geography, what period, whether the hotel revenue is gross or net of overseas ownership, or how much of the spend left town the moment it was spent.
Scope: which activity is in, and which is out. Geography: the city, the region, the country. Period: the year, and the source year of each input. Basis: whether each line is observed, modelled, or inferred. Retention: how much of the gross figure stayed in the local economy, by segment.
A footprint figure without those five is a headline. With them, it is a figure a statistics office can set beside its own and reconcile.
A footprint is total ongoing scale. Impact is the incremental change one decision caused. The two are never blended.
This is the mistake that gets a public-value case challenged for double-counting. The footprint is the total ongoing scale of the visitor economy, whatever produced it. The impact is the incremental change a specific decision caused, net of what would have happened anyway. Presenting a footprint as if it were the impact of an event, a route, or a policy is how a headline number turns into a credibility problem.
The useful version of a footprint follows the money through the supply chain rather than stopping at the point of first spend. The hotel pays the laundry, the laundry pays the energy company, and at each step some of the value stays local and some leaves through a national contract or an imported input. The segment-level view is what tells a government where to act: which sectors to grow, which procurement rules to change, where retention is weakest.
The three numbers are not a scandal. They are what happens when nobody defines the terms. Define them, keep footprint and impact apart, and the visitor economy’s contribution becomes a figure the whole committee can stand behind, and act on.
The method is on the pages for tourism economic footprint and supply-chain resilience and leakage.
For further reading, see OECD Tourism Trends and Policies 2024.
Before quoting any tourism contribution figure, check it states scope, geography, period, basis, and retention. If it states none, it is someone’s advocacy with a currency sign on it.
A hotel, a resort, or a mixed-use scheme fails underwriting when a single route, a single annual event, or a single source market turns out to be carrying more of the demand case than the committee realised. The dependency is the risk, and it can be measured before signature.
None of the three states what it includes, what period it covers, or whether the money stayed. A footprint figure is only useful when it carries its own definitions, and it is only defensible when it is kept separate from impact.
A major event is a rallying point for civic pride, and just as easily a rallying point for protest. The difference is usually whether residents can see what the event does for their street, in terms they recognise, before the road closures start.
International arrivals to the United States fell 4.2% in 2025 while worldwide travel grew about 4%. Living Lab’s displacement model puts the forgone spending at roughly US$50bn, and about US$10.6bn of it within reach of five economies. Each is limited by a different constraint.
During the 2026 World Cup, host-city hotel rates rose 13% on average. Miami rose 30.3%. New York fell 4.5%. The average was true and useless: it would have told all 16 cities the same thing, and been wrong for most of them.
At the Italian Grand Prix, the fleet of guest vehicles arrives on German plates with German drivers. The hospitality guests do not sleep in Monza, which hosts the race. They sleep in Milan, which does not. The town that pays captures a fraction of what the event generates.
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