The client

Yorkshire South Tourism, an organisation dedicated to promoting the region's visitor industry

The challenge

Policymakers are particularly interested in economic injections from outside of local areas. However, retention of visitor spend within local economies is equally important to the health of regional economies, including money spent on leisure and business travel activities, and associated spending by local residents. How to measure this can be a challenge.

What we did

Yorkshire South Tourism asked Sheffield Hallam to evaluate the existing methods of local and regional economic measurement used across the UK, and propose a more effective approach for estimating the overall value of South Yorkshire's visitor economy.

The investigation itself was split into two phases, beginning with a review of current methodologies and a recalculated estimation of the regional visitor economy based on existing data sources, with a more transparent disclosure of statistical reliability. The second research stage was to develop an appropriate model for future valuations. The newly devised model divides the economy into four areas - business and leisure day visitors, and business and leisure staying visitors.

The results

Trials of the new model using existing data have already shown its ability to demonstrate the areas of the economy where the highest value impacts are located, but once it is run using specifically collected data, it will be possible to use those areas for management information purposes and the targeting of resources.