Forecasting Foreign Tourist in Thailand by Artificial Neural Network

Tourism sector is an important sector for Thai economy even in the period of economic slowdown. Thai government has been allocated a significance budget to promote tourism. Then, number of reign tourists during 2003 to 2015 increased sharply. The empirical works suggested that the number of foreign tourists is the most important variable to set up the policy for promoting tourism. Therefore, this paper aims to forecast the number of foreign tourist in Thailand for the variety of scenario including the normal, positive and negative condition by set up the model called Artificial Neural Network (ANN). The estimated ANN with quarterly data during 2003 to 2015 can be employed for ex pose forecast with only 5.5 percent of forecast error. Tourist income and government budget to promote tourism, are the most important factors for forecast foreign tourists in Thailand. For the ex ante forecast, the results show the increasing in foreign tourists although the negative condition were assumed. For policy suggestions, the government budget should be implemented continuously to get the continuous growth in tourism sector. Moreover, the policy on supply side of the tourism sector should be implemented together with the government budget spending for promoting tourism in order to sustain the growing in tourism sector.