Tourism Technical Analysis System

Abstract

Accurate forecasts of tourism demand are prerequisites in the decision making process in many organizations in the private and public sectors. Any information concerning the future evolution of tourism flows is of great importance to hoteliers, tour operators and other industries concerned with tourism, services or transportation. In the last few decades international tourism demand has attracted substantial academic interest, resulting in a wide range of successful forecasting approaches. Much attention has been paid to econometric models that use regression techniques to estimate the underlying relationship between tourism demand and its determinants; unfortunately, empirical studies suggest that these models usually fail to outperform simple time series models. The current study focuses on an alternative approach, the Tourism Technical Analysis System (TTAS), incorporating the use of technical analysis techniques and building on the similarities between stock and tourism markets. The absolute and directional accuracy of TTAS is evaluated in relation to a range of time series and econometric methods for forecasting international tourism demand, using as a benchmark well-known published research.