TOURISM DATA IN CROATIA ASSESSED BY BENFORD'S LAW
TOURISM DATA IN CROATIA ASSESSED BY BENFORD'S LAW

Summary/Abstract: Tourism data is crucial for effective tourism management since it enables national and local authorities to shape public policies in tourism and also enables the tourism industry to make appropriate business decisions. In 2016 new tourism data information system, called eVisitor, was introduced in Croatia, and this new system significantly eased collection and data processing. The aim of this paper is to assess the quality of statistical data on tourist traffic and to determine whether the technical improvement of the data collection system, which eased reporting on tourist traffic to information providers, contributed to the quality of collected data. This is done by applying Benford’s distribution of first digits, i.e. Benford’s law, to the collected data. Benford’s law is based on the thesis that the first digits in numbers are not uniformly distributed and gives an expected pattern of numbers in the tabular data. Data that is not manipulated, accidentally or intentionally, should follow Benford’s distribution of first digits, and deviations from Benford’s distribution indicate that the data is compromised in some way. The conducted analysis has shown that the introduction of a new user-friendly data system did not affect the quality of collected data, but that the origin of the tourists was more important: data for domestic tourists have shown a statistically significant deviation from the expected Benford’s distribution, so it can be concluded that their quality is lower than the data for foreign tourists.

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