Alma Economics analysed over 1,200 responses to a public consultation on the Welsh Government’s proposal to provide discretionary powers for local authorities to raise a local visitor levy.

A key element of our research methodology involved deploying an Active Learning machine learning model to robustly analyse the key themes raised by respondents to the consultation questionnaire. This involved training a suite of models on a sample of manually reviewed responses, with our team of researchers supervising the model to determine the distribution of themes across the whole respondent base.

The findings from our analysis will be used by the Welsh Government to inform the future design of the levy, ensuring it is implemented in a fair way which supports a sustainable tourism industry, whilst minimising the administrative burden on local authorities and businesses.

➥ Read the full report here.