Factors Influencing Visitor's Choices of Urban Destinations in North ...

Results: Lim and McAleer found that the Holt-Winters additive and multiplicativeseasonal models outperform the single, double, and the Holt-Winters non-seasonalexponential smoothing models. This finding suggests that forecasters should beconcerned with seasonality of tourism demand data in Australia.Another finding of this paper is that forecasting the first difference of tourist arrivalsperforms worse than forecasting its levels. This result means that forecasters should notadjust for the presence of unit root in the tourist arrival data.“SFTIS 30 : A Decision Support System for Tourism Demand Analysis andForecasting”Petropoulos et al. (2003) believe that it is important to separate the decision byconsumers to travel in two separate stages. In the first stage, consumers decide whetherthey are going to travel or stay at home. In the second stage, those who have decided totravel choose a destination of interest. At each stage, different factors influence theconsumers’ decision to travel. This approach allowed Petropoulos et al. to include avariety of explanatory variables in the total system, a desirable attribute given thenumerous factors that affect the travel decision, but limit the number that appear in anyone equation in order to control statistical problems such as multicollinearity andheteroscedasticity.Relevance to Our ResearchUnlike the theoretical work quoted earlier, much of the empirical work noted in thissection focuses on the determination of tourism demand for a specific destination, ratherthan an examination of why tourists select one destination over others, the goal of thisproject. Consequently, the empirical research Global Insight reviewed seems of verylimited interest to this project. Lulendran and Witt’s look at the usefulness of errorcorrection models does emphasize the need to consider newly developed econometrictechniques in modelling tourist behaviour. Papatheodorou criticises many of the demandstudies for failing to take into account the degree to which the tourist travel market differsfrom the simple competitive situation; but his article is theoretic, and he does not offer hisown version of a model approach. A number of authors suggest that various time-seriesapproaches can be superior to a structural (econometric) demand model.30 Innovative decision support system used to forecast tourism demand for Greece.57