Have customers fill out questionnaires at tourism related businesses. Ask visitors to keep diaries while staying in your area to record all their expenditures. Often, however, you will find your community in this process of assessing tourism potential without having already established such a data collection mechanism and without wanting to take the time to collect this original data. Even if you get figures from a state resource, this local activity would be useful to make sure the numbers seem realistic for your area. Tourism brings in revenue through taxes on visitor expenditures, such as sales and accommodations taxes, some or all of which go to the local government.
Half goes to the state and the other half is retained locally.
This is important revenue to the public sector which often will be contributing to the costs of the project. Contact your State Department of Revenue and Taxation or the equivalent to predict how much new revenue might be generated by the potential level of visitation to your proposed project. Ask what portion of certain taxes are returned back to your local community. You will address this issue of public versus private costs and benefits in the impact assessments.