Tourism Intelligence International has developed on-going competence and capability in measuring the travel and tourism sector, using the Tourism Satellite Account. The World Tourism Organisation (WTO) has defined Tourism as the activities of persons travelling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes not related to the exercise of an activity remunerate from within the place visited. Tourism is an activity that has grown substantially over the last twenty-five years as an economic and social phenomenon. However, statistical information on the nature, progress and consequences of tourism is mainly based on arrivals and overnight stay statistics as well as balance of payment, which do not grasp the whole economic phenomenon of tourism.
In the past, the description of tourism focused on the characteristics of visitors, on the conditions in which they travelled and stayed, the purpose of their visit, etc. Today, there is an increasing awareness of the role that tourism is playing and can play, whether directly, indirectly or through induced effects in the economy in terms of generation of value-added employment, personal income, government income, etc.
Although tourism is by nature a demand phenomenon it is necessary, from an economic point of view, to observe the interplay between demand and supply and the impacts of such supply on the basic macroeconomic variables of a country.
Within the context of macroeconomic analysis the relationship between supply and demand is bet studied within the general framework of national accounts, and more specifically within the framework of supply and use tables.
However, visitor consumption is not restricted to a set of redefined goods and services produced by a predefined set of industries. What make tourism special are not so much what is acquired but the temporary situation in which the consumer finds himself/herself. This characteristic of the consumer cannot be found within the framework of national accounts where the transactors are classified according to (relatively) permanent characteristics, one of them being the country or place of residence.
In order to deal with such situations, a new international tourism satellite account (TSA) standard was developed in 2000 by the public/private sector Experts Committee under the auspices of the World Tourism Organisation as interpreted and operationalised by the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC)/WEFA.
The flow chart of the standard tourism satellite accounts follow: 
Tourism Intelligence International has adopted the "TSA recommended Methodological Framework", which is a set of definitions and classifications integrated into tables and organised in a logical consistent way. It allows the examination of the whole economic magnitude of tourism in both its aspects of demand and supply. It places the measurement of tourism as an economic phenomenon within the mainstream of macroeconomic statistics.
Tourism Intelligence International's TSA experts have spent many years preparing for this new standard and have assisted destinations in employing the "TSA Recommended Methodological Framework" to quantify the impacts of travel and tourism on their economies.   
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