Forecasting Tourist Arrivals to Sri Lanka Using Seasonal ARIMA

The benefits of accurate forecasts of international tourist arrivals in short and long term policy planning are well documented in tourism research literature. Forecast of the tourist arrivals can provide reliable estimates of tourist related product and services such as hotel rooms, car rentals, and a number of visitors to places of tourist attractions, etc. In particular, short term tourist arrival forecasts are very vital for optimal pricing of tourist related services such as air tickets and hotel rooms. However, we can find only a few research articles dealing with short term forecasting of international tourist arrivals to Sri Lanka. Therefore, we attempted to forecast monthly tourist arrivals to Sri Lanka using customized model building procedure, statistical time series modeling techniques. We found that general seasonal ARIMA model ARIMA 15(4, 0, 0)脳(0, 1, 0)12"> as a suitable model to forecast monthly international tourist arrivals to Sri Lanka. Keywords: tourism demand, Sri Lanka, forecasting, SARIMA