Forecasting tourism demand of tourist attractions during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, forecasting the tourism demand of tourist attractions is facing unprecedented difficulties given the lack of understanding about the pandemic impacts and the unavailability of post-pandemic data for generating forecasts. In this study, two strategies are proposed to improve forecasting performance and address the above difficulties. First, a novel COVID-19 impact indicator is built to reflect the impacts of the pandemic on tourism demand. Second, an effective forecast aggregation algorithm is developed to efficiently generate forecasts despite limited post-pandemic data availability. To validate the effectiveness of these strategies, an empirical study using real data from a tourist attraction is conducted, and results demonstrate that these strategies improve the overall forecast performance, including forecast accuracy and stability.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourist attraction
• tourism demand
• COVID-19 impact
• cross validation aggregation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 71701167] and Humanities and Social Science Projects of the Ministry of Education of China [grant number 17YJC630078].