Min­is­ter of Tourism Stephen Cadiz wants tourism stake­hold­ers in T&T to de­vel­op a unan­i­mous for­mat of da­ta col­lec­tion. Cadiz says the is­sue needs to be sort­ed out be­cause in­ac­cu­rate tourism da­ta can give a false re­flec­tion of the econ­o­my.In his ad­dress at the sign­ing cer­e­mo­ny for the To­ba­go Tourism De­vel­op­ment Fund at the Mt Irvine Bay Ho­tel, Cadiz said he had stopped quot­ing tourism ar­rival sta­tis­tics since they were all dif­fer­ent and could give an in­cor­rect view of the coun­try's ac­tu­al tourism po­si­tion.

"These things come from all sides. One minute I am get­ting TDC fig­ures and they may tell me 100, then the THA might tell me 101 and then the min­istry tells me 99, then the Cen­tral Sta­tis­ti­cal Of­fice gives me an­oth­er fig­ure prob­a­bly about 400."Re­al­ly and tru­ly, we can­not run an in­dus­try where we have fig­ures fly­ing out at us from all over the place we need to de­ter­mine, what are the ex­act fig­ures."

Cadiz said there was a dis­par­i­ty among tourism agen­cies with re­spect to spe­cif­ic tourism phas­es, and said the min­istry had em­barked on a dri­ve to iden­ti­fy of­fi­cial tourism pe­ri­ods such as Car­ni­val, East­er, sum­mer and win­ter."What I asked the min­istry to do is let us get an of­fi­cial pe­ri­od, like the Car­ni­val pe­ri­od and that goes for every­thing else."When does our sum­mer pe­ri­od start, when is our win­ter sea­son? I know there are in­ter­na­tion­al dates that de­ter­mine all of these but the fact of the mat­ter is if we have da­ta for places like the bank, fi­nances and mar­ket­ing plans and our da­ta is all over the place, re­al­ly and tru­ly it does us no good."