Rényi statistics are considered in a directed family of general exponential models. These statistics are defined as Rényi distances between estimated and hypothetical model. An asymptotically quadratic approximation to the Rényi statistics is established, leading to similar asymptotic distribution results as established in the literature for the likelihood ratio statistics. Some arguments in favour of the Rényi statistics are discussed, and a numerical comparison of the Rényi goodness-of-fit tests with the likelihood ratio test is presented.