Revisions and improvements to the MRTEs

About the revisions

The Monthly Regional Tourism Estimates (MRTEs) are created using a base of electronic card transaction data. However, the raw data provided is only partial, and excludes many parts of tourism spend — such as cash spending, and products that are purchased online before arriving in New Zealand.

Because of this, we align the MRTE totals to the more complete picture of tourism spending in the Tourism Satellite Account (TSA), produced annually by Stats NZ. Once we receive new data from the TSA each year, we revise the previously forecasted totals to reflect actual totals. Revisions are not considered errors, as they're part of standard statistical processes.

For more information about revisions, see the Summary results section of the published Tourism satellite account document.

Tourism satellite account: 2018(external link)

Latest revisions

As part of the standard annual revisions process, we've revised the MRTEs using the latest Tourism Satellite Account figures, released in December 2018.

We have produced a web app that shows the differences between the new revised series and the previously published series. This app allows you to select your region and see graphs and tables, and allows the option to download the data. The app is available here(external link).