Pilot Visitor Survey

Tender description

Fáilte Ireland’s role is to guide and support sustainable growth in tourism earnings and employment. It provides consumer and competitor insights, mentoring, investment and trade supports across the business, event and leisure sectors to help secure sales growth from targeted overseas and domestic market segments. The Survey of Overseas Travellers (SOT) provides data and trends on the seasonal and regional dispersal of overseas travellers in the ROI. It is a critical component of the set of tools Fáilte Ireland uses to formulate effective strategies for tourism development as well as providing statistical input for Fáilte Ireland’s various advisory and research publications. The data is also widely used by Tourism Ireland and other partner agencies, including Northern Ireland Statistics Research Agency (NISRA) (who only receive anonymised aggregate data). Historically, data has been collected at ports of entry and exit (both air and sea) through FTF (Face-to-Face) and HAPI (Handheld-Device Assisted Personal Interview). Fáilte Ireland is looking for a service provider to pilot an alternative data collection methodology to the one currently used. The service provider should recommend the new methodology, along with a detailed rationale, explanation and justification as to why the method is appropriate. A full analysis of the reliability and validity of any methodologies proposed must be included, and attention paid to issues such as response rates, bias, panel stagnation etc.