News | Wednesday, 20 May 2009

MHRA slates NSO on hotel pricing stats

The MHRA yesterday rubbished NSO claims about hotel prices rising. In a press statement, a spokesperson for the association categorically challenged the findings announced by the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices issued last Friday, in which the hotel industry is shown as having increased its prices by 11.7 points.
“Based on our own internal figures and information, these statistics are both erroneous and misleading and appear to be generated by the methodology used by NSO in its calculation of the whole Consumer Price Index, which is resulting in the provision of wrong information to the general public,” the spokesperson said.
“Unfortunately this is far from being the first time that MHRA is at loggerheads with the NSO. On many past occasions MHRA has strongly questioned the methodology employed by the NSO in calculating figures pertaining to the tourism industry.”
One such recent occurrence concerned the NSO Tourstat report, which indicated that the guest night statistics for the month of February had increased by 2.7 per cent over February of last year, while MHRA’s internal statistics showed a year on year drop of around 14 per cent for the same period. NSO subsequently pointed out that the Tourstat report was compiled from an ad hoc survey conducted by NSO staff at the airport upon visitors’ departure and admitted that the Accomstat report did show more reliable statistics. The MHRA pointed out that this huge margin of error was unacceptable as it resulted in a variance of major proportions which ultimately leads to incorrect statements being made by politicians as well as the wrong decisions being taken by people in authority who depend on the accuracy of such statistics.

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