The Pattern of International Tourist Arrivals And Revenue Estimates for Malaysia: 2002–2007

Abstract

This article discusses the applications and the results of the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) forecasting model to predict the international tourist arrivals into Malaysia using the monthly data from January 2002 through December 2007. Based on the arrivals and the average length of stay, the revenue was computed and the time series forecast model was fitted to estimate the total revenue for the Malaysian tourism industry. International arrivals into Malaysia remained resilient and have been dominant by Asian visitors. The five Asian countries, namely Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Brunei, and China, together accounted for 75.3% of the international tourist arrivals into Malaysia and contributed to 66.5%, of the Malaysian tourism revenue for the year 2007. The forecasting models were also fitted for tourists coming into Malaysia from these five countries for future planning and managerial applications. It is worthwhile to mention that the forecasted arrivals and revenue for the year 2008 almost coincide with the actual Malaysian official tourism figures and the variation is negligible, which strengthens the validity and the robustness of the fitted models.