This paper addresses the question of whether tourism spending will decrease poverty. Real incomes and tourism spending are usually positively correlated, thus complicating the question of causality from tourism spending to poverty. Regional Vietnamese data are applied in a test of whether tourism spending – in a model of poverty – will increase the forecasting performance compared to a model including only incomes. The test results reveal no improvement of the forecasting performance when tourism spending is included. Thus, there is no evidence of a direct link from tourism spending to poverty, but there may be indirect effects via incomes.