Forecasting International Tourist (A Case Study of Iran)

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

Abstract

Extended Abstract
Forecasting is an essential analytical tool for tourism policy and planning. Business success, marketing decisions, government’s investment policy as well as macroeconomic policy are influenced by the accuracy of tourism forecasts, since the tourism product comprises a number of services that cannot be accumulated,  Accurate forecasts of tourism demand are paramount to ensure the availability of such services when demanded. on the other hand since univariate time series modeling has proved to be a very successful method for forecasting tourist arrivals,  In this article, along with study of ARFIMA and artificial intelligence methods ,we use the new hybrid approach combining ARFIMA and feed forward neural networks (FNN) proposed by  Aladagh et al. in 2012.For this purpose, ARFIMA, ANN and ARFIMA-ANN models are considered and compared their results in different time horizon using IRICA(The Islamic Republic of Iran Customs Administration) monthly time series of tourist arrivals to Iran from march 1999 to march 2012. According to MAPE, RMSE and MAE criteria, the forecasting performance of the ARFIMA-ANN model is better than the ARFIMA and ANN models at the horizons of 6, 12, 18 and 24 months and thus it can be used as suitable model for forecasting tourist arrivals to Iran.
 
 
Introduction
Forecasting is an essential analytical tool for tourism policy and planning. Accurate forecasting of future tourist flow is essential to determine successful investments in the tourism industry for both the public and the private sectors. For the public sector, estimation of tourism demand is important in order to make efficient use of transportation and resources. For the private sector, such as airlines, good tourism forecasting is useful for planning aircraft, facilities and manpower needs (Chang and Liao, 2010:215), despite of the importance of this issue, very little research has been done in this area in IRAN. Therefore In this article, ARFIMA, ANN and ARFIMA-ANN models were used for forecasting of country’s tourism time series.
 
Materials and Methods
Since univariate time series modeling has proved to be a very successful method for forecasting tourist arrivals, it is also the method employed in this paper. In order to choose best model for forecasting tourist arrivals to Iran ARFIMA, ANN and ARFIMA-ANN methods were compared to forecast tourist flows to Iran at the horizons of 6, 12, 18 and 24 months using IRICA(The Islamic Republic of Iran Customs Administration) monthly time series of tourist arrivals to Iran from march 1999 to march 2012.
 
Discussion and Results
According to MAPE, RMSE and MAE  criteria, the best results is obtained by hybrid(ARFIMA-ANN) method which means that ARFIMA-ANN thus it can be used as suitable model for forecasting tourist arrivals to Iran.
 
Conclusions
The ARFIMA-ANN method is appropriate method to forecast foreign tourist to Iran and it will can be used as suitable model for forecasting tourist arrivals to Iran.


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