FORECASTING TOURIST ARRIVALS TO LANGKAWI ISLAND MALAYSIA

Tourism is the act of travelling for a person or group of people from their own locality to a specific destination in a short term or long term period either for leisure or business purposes. Tourism is an important sector in the Malaysian economy where tourism development will lead to the positive economic development of the country and in general improve the quality of life for all citizens. Therefore, forecasting tourist arrivals with high accuracy becomes important since it may ensure the development and the readiness of all tourism related industries such as hotels, transportation, food and services industries and their best shape. This study focuses on tourist arrivals in Langkawi Island as one of the major tourist attractions situated in the northerly region of Peninsular Malaysia. Importantly, this paper attempts to measure and compare the performance of forecasting with Exponential Smoothing, ARIMA and ARFIMA models using the R software package