A Study on Forecasting Models for Cruise Demand: Comparisons Between South Korea and Hong Kong

Abstract

The cruise industry has emerged to be an important part of

the tourism sector since there has been a large increase in the number

of passengers worldwide. The purpose of this study is to forecast

cruise tourism demand, as doing so can ensure better planning,

efficient preparation at the destination port and act as a basis for the

elaboration of future plans. In this study, forecasting methods such as

Exponential Triple Smoothing (ETS), Autoregressive Integrated

Moving Average (ARIMA) and Group Method of Data Handling

(GMDH) are tested to estimate the cruise demand and the best

forecasting model is suggested by comparing the forecast accuracy.

The total number of foreign cruise passengers are used as the

measure of cruise demand. The results show that GMDH outperforms

ETS and ARIMA in terms of forecasting accuracy.