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The Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) is set to pioneer the Accommodation Unit Survey (AUS) to obtain baseline data to determine the level of supply and demand for commercial accommodation facilities such as hotels, guest houses and budget hotels across the country.
It is aimed at profiling accommodation units in terms of the characteristics of products, facilities and rates, assessing their supply and demand.
The survey was launched at the Coconut Grove Hotel in Accra yesterday during a stakeholder engagement meeting.
It will also measure employment and remuneration in the accommodation sub-sector and determine operating expenses, sales and revenue from accommodation units.
Some stakeholders present at the meeting were representatives from the Ghana Tourism Authority (GTA), the Ghana Hoteliers Association (GHA), the Ghana Progressive Hotels Association and members of the National Technical Advisory Committee of the Tourism Satellite Account (TSA) Project.
In a presentation on the AUS, the 2024 AUS Coordinator at the GSS, Dr Ebenezer Kojo Ocran, said the survey would commence in November this year to October next year and would cover commercial accommodation units in all 261 districts in the 16 regions that are mainly engaged in providing short-stay commercial accommodation, including both licensed and unlicensed.
These are hotels, guest houses, budget hotels, hostels, homestay, apartments and other accommodations, he indicated, were from the list of 2024 Integrated Business Establishment Survey 1 (2024 IBES 1).
He added that AUS sought to collect information on accommodation units’ revenue trends, capacity, occupancy, number of guests, number of guest nights, room prices and other key performance indicators.
Dr Ocran projected that the findings of the survey would help “identify occupancy trends and patterns; optimise pricing strategies and improve customer satisfaction”.
The findings are also to enhance facility management, inform marketing strategies, data-driven decision making, enhance revenue management, improve online accommodation reservation or bookings and improve operational efficiency.
The Director of Research, Monitoring and Evaluation (RME) of the Ghana Tourism Authority, Dr Spencer Doku, underscored the importance of the survey to the tourism sectors, stating that it “will enable Ghana to benchmark its accommodation sector performance against other African and global destinations”.
He added that GTA fully embraced the collaboration with the GSS, expressing the GTA’s commitment to actively participate in engagements across the Middle and Coastal Belts and offer the necessary support during fieldwork.
For his part, the President of the GHA, Dr Edward Ackah-Nyamike, indicated that the association recognised the importance of the sector to the country’s economic growth and, therefore, needed data to back its activities.
He added that the country was widely known as a tourism destination in Africa, as such it must obtain data that would help it examine its status and ensure that the needed changes that must be done to ensure the sector improved were done by the association in collaboration with the various stakeholders.
“Ghana is considered a tourist destination and for countries that are tourist destinations, one of the things that everybody will look out for going into the future is to develop that tourism satellite account. If we don't do it, very soon, we cannot even pride ourselves as a tourism country,” he said.
