Official figures on how many tourists visit Amsterdam are unreliable because they are based on biased research, according to tourism expert Stephen Hodes in the Parool.

Hodes, who is a member of the independent think tank Amsterdam in Progress, says a report on the economic impact of tourism on Amsterdam by research bureau SEO  wanders into unreliable territory from the start.

The report opens with the statement: ‘the number of visitors to Amsterdam rose from 11 million to almost 18 million between 2005 and 2016’ but does not explain how this figure was reached, Hodes points out.

He says SEO researchers based the figure on data provided by Amsterdam Marketing, the Dutch bureau for tourism and congresses NBTC, and the Amsterdam City Index.

The first two are promotional organisations ‘with a vested interest in certain outcomes’ while the Amsterdam City Index is a retailers organisation, which ‘focuses on the economy and expressly says it want to be a voice for retailers’, Hodes said.

The organisations also use different research methods when it comes to counting tourists and calculating average tourist spending, the two things that matter when ascertaining the impact of tourism.

‘So it remains unclear how many people visit Amsterdam and how much they spend. The research is based on too many estimates and too much unreliable data. You can’t conclude anything from it’, Hodes said.