Tourism Minister Renee Webb's announcement this week that she will not release tourism figures unless and until she has received statistics on tourism spending is the latest chapter in a long running story about the disappearance of statistics for Bermuda's second industry.

Under the United Bermuda Party governments, monthly tourism arrival figures came out like clockwork. The figures detailed total arrivals, where visitors came from, how long they stayed, how many "bed nights" the visitors spent on the Island and where they stayed - from large hotels to private homes.

As such, they were a useful and frequent barometer of the state of the industry. They were not simply a matter of keeping score, but they were tools for businesses and residents who needed to keep track of trends in the industry and to plan for the future.

Under the Progressive Labour Party, late Tourism Minister David Allen stopped releasing the figures directly to the media and began publishing them in the Official Gazette after a mistake was made in a story.

Later, they stopped coming out on a monthly basis and began coming out quarterly.

Now Ms Webb has said that that may stop as well.

The reason? She said that the raw arrival figures are incomplete because they do not account for spending, the key barometer of the health of the industry. She's right on that point, even though she is wrong overall.

If one visitor spends ten nights on the Island and spends an average of $100 a day, he or she is more valuable to Bermuda than nine visitors who each spend one night on the Island and spend the same $100 each. The one visitor puts $1,000 into the economy while the nine visitors only put in $900.

The monthly figures did not provide spending figures, but they did provide an indicator of spending by showing bednights and length of stay. The major expenditure of any hotel visitor is on accommodation.

And the tourism spending figures do in fact come out every quarter - in Government's Quarterly Bulletin of Statistics.

So Ms Webb could call on the numbers for the first quarter of the year right now, assuming they are ready, as they usually are by now.

The Royal Gazette has been told that they will in fact be late, not due to any heinous plot to hide what are likely to be rather poor figures, but because the Department of Statistics is apparently overwhelmed by its workload from the Adult Literacy Survey and an Economic Activity Survey.

In the meantime, the public has no real idea how the tourism industry has fared since the beginning of April. Tourism did eventually say that arrivals for January through March were down 10.7 percent, and it is hard to believe that tourism spending can have risen then as a result.

In the meantime, businesses that rely on the tourism industry will have to dust off their crystal balls and rely on anecdotal evidence as they plan for the future.

Still, it is hard to escape the notion that if visitor arrivals had been rising for the last five years and not falling, the Government would be falling over itself to get the figures out. It's human nature to trumpet successes and rationalise failures.

Many hotels have reported better than expected May occupancies and good projections for June, so it would not be surprising if some tourism arrival figures were announced before July 24. Whether they will include spending figures remains to be seen.