Classical Forecasting of International Tourist Arrivals to Thailand

The objectives of this work are to find the suitable forecasting model and forecasting period of the number of foreign tourists traveling to Thailand. The monthly data is gathered during January 2008 to December 2019 and is divided into two sets. The first set is the data from January 2008 to December 2018 for the modelling by the method of decomposition, Holt-Winter's exponential smoothing method and the Box-Jenkins. The second is the monthly data in 2019 for comparing the performance of the forecasting models via the criteria of the lowest mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and the root mean square error (RMSE). The results show that, in term of forecasting, the multiplicative decomposition is the most accurate technique for the short-term (3 months) forecasting period with the lowest MAPE and RMSE of 1.04% and 42,054.29 international tourists, respectively.