Lagos State Commissioner for Tourism, Arts and Culture, Uzamat Akinbile-Yusuf, has announced a data collection programme: ‘Q4-Lagos Initiative’, to enable the state ascertain number of visitors and tourists each quarter.
Akinbile-Yusuf yesterday said the state partnered QTourism Limited and stakeholders to support its tourism masterplan for maximum visitor potential.
She said the focus was to “establish Lagos as the premier destination through a data-driven calendar of activities that will make data of visitors to the state available for use and future reference.”
The commissioner said: “With this launch of this Q4-Lagos Initiative, it is now compulsory for all our stakeholders to always keep the ministry informed of all their activities and programmes for the purpose of collating necessary data from these events.
“The Ministry considered it worrisome that there are no reliable statistics and data about the numbers of visitors or tourists that visit Lagos on yearly basis.
“The data about their contributions to the State’s economy are often not captured as well.
“The need to change this and have more holistic data on tourists to Lagos State brought about the conceptualization of the Q4 Initiative.”
Representative of QTourism, Mr Ivor Ekpe, said the initiative would provide real-time data for tourists visiting the state.
Ekpe said the company built a platform to assist government, private sector investors and tourists in accessing information.
He said: “The importance of this programme is that we are moving into the last quarter of the year and there are going to be many events and activities in Lagos.
“People are going to come in, people are going to hold shows and hotels are going to have a lot of traffic.
“This is just the beginning of gathering information and it is also on the flip side, trying to assure people looking at Lagos that we have recommendations for them at no cost.”