Bea Travel Tourism Satellite Account Data: Dataset Structure and Field Coverage

The Travel and Tourism Satellite Account (TTSA) is the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis's official extension of the national input-output accounts, built to isolate tourism demand and the industries that serve it. It is not a single headline statistic. Each annual release publishes a complete cross-industry snapshot - output, value added, employment, compensation and prices for tourism commodities - with 'Traveler accommodations' carried as its own commodity line in every one of the eight tables.

Inside Datadory's Hotel & Resort REITs slice (16 primary datasets, 7 related records, 23 pooled), the account is the demand-macro anchor and scores 8 out of 10 on the catalog rubric. It is also the only record in the slice that sizes a single lodging commodity inside the national accounts rather than beside them.

Three coverage facts frame everything else. The archive holds 27 per-year Excel workbooks spanning 1998 through 2023. The final regular release covers 2018 through 2023 and ran in the Survey of Current Business in February 2025. Geography stops at the national border - United States totals only, no state or metro detail - which is exactly why the geographic layers of this stack belong to other datasets.

Unit discipline is the one parsing trap. Nominal tables carry the flag [Millions of dollars]; the two employment tables carry [Thousands of Employees]; Table 8 restates output in millions of chained (2017) dollars with chain-type price indexes indexed to the same 2017 base. Keeping chained-dollar sheets apart from nominal ones is the difference between a clean time series and a doubled 2017 observation.

'Traveler accommodations' is the reason this account matters to a lodging analyst, because it removes the proxy problem. The commodity lines present in the verified 2023 workbook are Traveler accommodations, Food services and drinking places, Air transportation services, Automotive rental and leasing, Gambling and All other recreation and entertainment - so lodging's share of total tourism output can be computed directly, by division, rather than inferred from hotel tax receipts or booking volumes.

Table 3 goes further and attributes demand four ways: resident households, business, government and nonresidents. That split is the closest official read available on the leisure-versus-business mix behind US accommodation spending, and it is the piece the Census Bureau's Quarterly Services Survey cannot supply, since NAICS 721 revenue arrives without a visitor-type breakdown.

Around the headline line sit the derived measures a model actually consumes: direct tourism output and total tourism-related output, the latter adding indirect multiplier effects; tourism employment in thousands of employees and compensation in millions of dollars by industry; and chain-type price indexes for real tourism output, indexed to 2017. Field definitions on the Datadory record are marked verified against the workbook contents themselves, not documentation alone.

The documented join is deflation: divide Census QSS traveler-accommodation revenue by the TTSA's chain-type price indexes from Table 8 to separate real travel demand from price effects, extending the frozen 2023 relationship forward on quarterly revenue alone. On the company side, cross-read the result against the comparable-hotel RevPAR and occupancy lodging REITs disclose in SEC filings - our SEC EDGAR versus BEA TTSA scorecard puts the issuer-level and economy-wide views side by side.

For the record behind every number above, see the dataset-level BEA Travel and Tourism Satellite Account page, the hotel-resort-reits data hub indexing the full slice, and the free hotel-resort-reits datasets shortlist.