Tourist Arrivals to Sabah by Using Fuzzy Forecasting

The aim of this paper is to investigate the existing tourist trend arrival in Sabah based on fuzzy approach. It focuses on the latest 12 years (2002 – 2013) visitors arrival based on their nationality for forecasting purposes. Based on Sabah Tourism Board’s data, the tourist arrival continue to grow annually but with an inconsistent number of arrival. This can be seen from the trend of tourist arrival from 2011 to 2012. There is an increase in the number of arrival but only at 1.1 % compared to the other years which are in the rank of 10 – 18% increase in number of arrival per year. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to predict the number of tourist arrival to Sabah. The study employs the modification of Fuzzy Delphi Method (FDM) and utilizes the flexibility of triangular fuzzy numbers (TFNs) as well as fuzzy averaging to deal with the yearly inconsistency numbers of visitor’s arrival. Then, the trio levels of alpha (α)-cut was used via linguistic variables to assess the confidence of decision made and to overcome the uncertainty of the input data sets. The analysis was carried out using fully data sets obtained from the official website of Sabah tourism board. Results show that our proposed forecasting approach offers a new dimension technique as compared to the traditional statistical method. It also derived more confident decision and precision forecast for Sabah tourism authority planning purposes