Forecasting Inbound Tourism Demand in Thailand with Grey Model

摘要

Tourism has been considered as a "smokeless" and important industry in many countries in the world because it can not only generate plenty of quality jobs but also offer great contribution to the GDP. In order to make the tourism industry grow stably, getting to know its determinants becomes critical. However, it has been found in several studies that the determinants are neither easily measured nor collected due to their availability. Hence, until now, there is no standard forecasting model that can be applied in different situations of the industry. Moreover, due to certain limitations in collecting data of inbound tourism demand, it is therefore suggested in this study to use Grey forecasting approach which has been widely employed in different areas because it can deal with the problems of uncertainty with few data points and/or poor information. In the empirical case study of annual inbound tourism demand in Thailand, after being modified with Fourier series, the traditional Grey model GM(1,1) is significantly improved and becomes FGM(1,1) which has very low value of mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 0.0099. It is therefore suggested to forecast the inbound tourism demand in Thailand.