International Passenger Survey, 2005

The <i>International Passenger Survey</i> (IPS) aims to collect data on both credits and debits for the travel account of the Balance of Payments, provide detailed visit information on overseas visitors to the United Kingdom (UK) for tourism policy, and collect data on international migration.<br> The depositor recommends that only expert users who are very familiar with the coding and weighting structures use these data, as limited support is available. Some considerable understanding of the data is required before meaningful analyses can be made; care must be taken when performing time series operations as codes can vary from year to year and not all variables from one year's dataset are used in other years. <br><br><b>Weighting the IPS</b><br>ONS advise that the variable 'fweight' included in the 'Qcontact' dataset should be applied to get an overall weighted profile. This weight is set consistently overtime. Other weights are provided to analyse finer detail but no information is provided in the documentation. ONS are currently reviewing the documentation but in the meantime if users have any detailed weighting questions they should contact the ONS at: [email protected].<br><br>The data cover four subject areas, termed 'Airmiles', 'Alcohol', 'Qregtown' and 'Qcontact'. One file is produced each quarter per subject area, and the dataset updated quarterly. These files can be joined together using the variables YEAR, SERIAL, FLOW and QUARTER. <br><br>For the fifth edition (August 2006), a revised version of all data for 2005 was deposited, due to changes in the weighting methodology. See study READ file for full details.<br>