J, who walks lengths of the beach most mornings, says there are many fewer beach walkers than in previous years. The government is mostly pretty positive about numbers of tourists, but we're curious about how they know - and conclude that they don't. There is nothing to tell immigration whether someone arriving on a plane from Heathrow with a UK passport is a tourist, an ex-pat, a visiting relative, or a UK businessman. They certainly don't take long enough to ask, and in fact if our experience is anything to go by they could hire only the deaf and dumb as immigration officers and nobody would ever notice.
Hotels do record passports, so maybe that's how it's done. Although a tourist who stayed in several hotels while touring could only be tracked by name or passport number, and it seems unlikely that the Cyprus government could do this accurately even in response to a request by Interpol. And maybe that's what it boils down to. We're just cynical about the Cypriot bureaucracy's competence. After all, all countries do have tourist stats, presumably some of them fairly reliable.