Forecasting tomorrow’s tourist

This study aims to present a very recent literature review on tourism demand forecasting based on 50 relevant articles published between 2013 and June 2016.

For searching the literature, the 50 most relevant articles according to Google Scholar ranking were selected and collected. Then, each of the articles were scrutinized according to three main dimensions: the method or technique used for analyzing data; the location of the study; and the covered timeframe.

The most widely used modeling technique continues to be time series, confirming a trend identified prior to 2011. Nevertheless, artificial intelligence techniques, and most notably neural networks, are clearly becoming more used in recent years for tourism forecasting. This is a relevant subject for journals related to other social sciences, such as Economics, and also tourism data constitute an excellent source for developing novel modeling techniques.

The present literature review offers recent insights on tourism forecasting scientific literature, providing evidences on current trends and revealing interesting research gaps.