The perishable nature of tourism products and services makes forecasting an important tool for tourism planning, especially in the current COVID-19 pandemic time. The forecast assists tourism organizations in decision-making regarding resource allocations to avoid shortcomings. This study is motivated by the need to model periodic time series with linear and nonlinear trends. A hybrid Polynomial-Fourier series model that uses the combination of polynomial and Fourier fittings to capture and forecast time series data was proposed. The proposed model is applied to monthly foreign visitors to Turkey from January 2014 to August 2020 dataset and diagnostic checks show that the proposed model produces a statistically good fit. To improve the model forecast, a Monte Carlo simulation scheme with 100 simulation paths is applied to the model residue. The mean of the 100 simulation paths within [Formula: see text] bounds from the model curve was taken and found to give statistically acceptable results.
Modeling and forecasting of tourism data have received attention in the past decades. Turkey is one of the countries that benefit significantly from the tourism industry. Several time-series models have been recommended to best describe tourist arrivals to Turkey. However, in the 21st century, the world experiences great uncertainty in most possible event outcomes. These uncertainties are very difficult to account for. We proposed a hybrid artificial neural network (ANN)-polynomial-Fourier method to model the number of foreign visitors to Turkey from January 2004 to December 2020. The proposed model performance before and during the COVID-19 pandemic is evaluated separately. We evaluate the model performance by comparing with results from Danbatta and Varol (2021, https://doi.org/10.1142/S179396232141004X), Fourier series, and ARIMA models. To account for prediction uncertainties, we ran 300 Monte Carlo simulations within ±2σ from the model regression curve. According to the result outcomes, the proposed ANN-polynomial-Fourier has proven worthy to be considered a candidate model for the Turkish tourism data. The multistep ahead forecast suggests a 10.22% increase in the monthly foreign visitors' arrivals to Turkey in the year 2021.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.