Where Should We Go? Internet Searches and Tourist Arrivals

Serhan Cevik

No 2020/022, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: The widespread availability of internet search data is a new source of high-frequency information that can potentially improve the precision of macroeconomic forecasting, especially in areas with data constraints. This paper investigates whether travel-related online search queries enhance accuracy in the forecasting of tourist arrivals to The Bahamas from the U.S. The results indicate that the forecast model incorporating internet search data provides additional information about tourist flows over a univariate approach using the traditional autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model and multivariate models with macroeconomic indicators. The Google Trends-augmented model improves predictability of tourist arrivals by about 30 percent compared to the benchmark ARIMA model and more than 20 percent compared to the model extended only with income and relative prices.

Keywords: WP; search data; tourist arrival; Internet search process; Google Trends data; internet search volume; arrivals to The Bahamas; Personal income; Tourism; Real effective exchange rates; Caribbean; Forecasting; tourist arrivals; Google Trends; time-series models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 16
Date: 2020-01-31
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-for and nep-ict
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Journal Article: Where should we go? Internet searches and tourist arrivals (2022)
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