Tourism Demand Forecasting Model Using Neural Network

This study applied the Artificial Neural Network combined with the Genetic Algorithm to establish a prediction model of air ticket sales revenue that had good predictive capability and could provide travel agency operators with reliable and highly efficient analysis data.

Abstract

Travel agencies should be able to judge the market demand for tourism to develop sales plans accordingly.However, many travel agencies lack the ability to judge the market demand for tourism, and thus make risky business decisions.Based on the above, this study applied the Artificial Neural Network combined with the Genetic Algorithm (GA) to establish a prediction model of air ticket sales revenue.GA was used to determine the optimum number of input and hidden nodes of a feedforward neural network.The empirical results suggested that the mean absolute relative error(MARE) of the proposed hybrid model's predicted value of air ticket sales revenue and the actual value was 10.51%and the correlation coefficient was 0.913.The proposed model had good predictive capability and could provide travel agency operators with reliable and highly efficient analysis data.