Unnecessary work for the reader
From Newshub:
Overall opening day bookings for the Abel Tasman Track are already up from 551 last year to 811 this year.
Kiwi bookings have doubled, while international bookings are down by 20 percent. However, Ms Sage admits international visitors’ bookings could be masquerading as Kiwis.
“There may be some people around the fringes, but it relies on honesty.”
For more idea of how much of an issue there might be with honesty of foreigners, it would be nice to compare the increase in local bookings and decrease in international bookings as actual numbers, not as percentages. You can work this out (approximately) from the information given, but it involves high-school maths (solving a pair of linear equations), so perhaps DoC could just have been asked.
To add up to the numbers in the story, local bookings must have increased from about 308 to 616 and international bookings decreased from about 242 to 194. So, even if the entire decrease in international bookings was people pretending to be Kiwi, it would only explain a small fraction of the increase in local bookings.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »