Visiting probability model: a new method for tourist volume forecasting

ABSTRACT

Tourist volume forecasting is an ongoing theme in tourism research. Current methods rely too much on the previous tourist arrivals data. Based on tourism system perspective, we propose a visiting probability model composed of five independent variables: the attractiveness of a destination, the travel time from a origin to the destination, the traffic expense to and from the destination, the physical fatigue travel time and the per capita disposable monthly income of the origin. The model provides a new method for forecasting the number of tourists from a specific origin without historical tourist arrivals data.

KEYWORDS:

• Visiting probability model
• tourist volume forecasting
• tourism system
• tourism marketing
• domestic tourism
• distance-decay
• spatial differentiation
• scenic spots
• China
• Asia Pacific

Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41671135), the Tourism Talents Project of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of China (No. WMYC20181-032), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. GK201804004).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41671135), the Tourism Talents Project of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of China (No. WMYC20181-032), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. GK201804004).