Released yesterday by the Fitial administration, the report presents the data from July to September of 2010.
Commerce said the data were researched and tabulated by the central statistics division with contributions from other government agencies and the private sector.
Aside from visitor arrival and hotel occupancy rates, the quarterly report also shows trends in banking, remittance, auto sales, business gross revenue, business permits and consumer price index.
The report however, only shows the BGR and government expenditure report up to the second quarter of 2010 because the data for the third quarter were not available yesterday.
The data showed that from $424.6 million in the first quarter, the BGR reached $453.8 in the second quarter last year, an increase of 6.9 percent.
The second quarter BGR was also higher by 14.7 percent compared to the same quarter of 2009 which was $395.7 million.
The government expenditures of $39.5 million in the first quarter of 2010 slid to $37.8 million in the second quarter, a 3.4 percent reduction compared to the expenditure in the same quarter in 2009, which was $38.2 million.
Government expenditure dramatically went up in the third and fourth quarters of 2009, a general election year. The government spent $42.6 million in the third quarter and $47.3 in the fourth quarter of 2009.
During that period, the BGR indicator went south. From $411.9 million in the first quarter of 2009, it went down to $395 million in the second and down further to $356.6 million in third quarter but gained a little in the fourth quarter when it reached $388.1 million.
Visitor arrivals, hotel occupancy
Visitor arrivals from Japan in 2010 indicated a rollercoaster-like movement each quarter: 58,974 in the first, 35,348 in the second then 53,705 in the third.
The second quarter of the year is one of the two “death valley” periods for the local tourism industry. But 2010’s “death valley” period was better than that of 2009 when the islands had only 38,199 tourists. It bounced back in the third quarter with 54,690 Japanese tourists coming in before going down again in the fourth quarter to 34,793.
Tourist arrivals from South Korea fluctuated each quarter but were consistently going up each year. In the first quarter of 2009, there were 22,513 tourists from Korea. This number went down to 19,868 in the second quarter, but went up to 24,889 in the third quarter and went down again to 21,862 in the fourth quarter.
The Korean arrivals improved in 2010 — 29,498 in the first quarter; 27,193 in the second; and 29,526 in the third.
Arrivals from China and Hong Kong in the second quarter of 2009 totaled 3,792. The figure went up to 9,385 in the third quarter of 2009 and went down to 7,890 in the fourth.
But in 2010, more tourists from China and Hong Kong arrived: 12,547 in the first quarter; 8,940 in the second; and 11,335 in the third.
Commerce said these trends in the tourist arrival caused positive movements in the hotel occupancy rate.
In the first quarter of 2010, CNMI hotels had the highest occupancy rate with an average of 76.2 percent. This was higher by 4 percent compared to same quarter of the 2009 which was 73 percent but 57.2 percent higher than the preceding quarter, the fourth quarter of 2009, which was only 48.4 percent.
The occupancy rate went down to 53 percent in the second quarter but went up to 64.5 percent in the third quarter.
