FORECASTING INTERNATIONAL TOURIST ARRIVALS IN MALAYSIA USING SARIMA AND HOLT-WINTERS MODEL

Tourism can be described as the activities of visitors who make a visit to the main destination outside their usual environment for less than a year for any purpose. The tourism industry has become one of the influential sectors in global economic growth. Thus, tourism forecasting plays an important role in public and private sectors concerning future tourism flows. This study is an attempt to determine the best model in forecasting the international tourist's arrival in Malaysia based on Box-Jenkins and Holt-Winters model. The comparison of the accuracy of the techniques between Box-Jenkins SARIMA and Holt-Winters model was done based on the value of Mean Square Error (MSE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). The secondary time series data were obtained from the Tourism Malaysia Department, which consists of a number of tourist arrivals from Singapore, Korea, and the United Kingdom from the year 2013 until the year 2017. The findings of this study suggest that the SARIMA and Holt-Winters model are suitable to be used in forecasting tourist arrivals. This study found that the Holt-Winters model is the appropriate model to forecast tourist arrivals from the United Kingdom (UK) and Korea. While SARIMA (1,1,1) (1,1,1)12 is the appropriate model for forecasting tourist arrivals from Singapore.