Forecastin Domestic Tourism Demand: Application to Las Vegas Arrivals Data

Abstract

Domestic tourism demand is less susceptible than international tourism demand to external factors such as exchange rate fluctuations and international political events, and therefore is likely to be less volatile. Hence, the accuracy rankings obtained for various forecasting techniques when applied to international tourism data may no longer hold when the techniques are applied to domestic tourism data. This study illustrates that the superior ity of the "no change" extrapolation model in the context of international tourism forecast ing does not carry over to the domestic tourism forecasting case. Using data on Las Vegas visitor arrivals, it is shown that exponential smoothing generates forecasts with lower error magnitudes than "no change."