Modelling Tourism Flows from Europe to Australia

Abstract

The period since 1980 has seen unprecedented interest in Australia by Europeans, particularly from the UK, Germany and Italy. The importance of these nations, as well as of Europe as a whole, in terms of providing tourists to Australia, is the focus of this paper. More specifically, our aim is to generate demand models which seek to explain what determines tourism flows to Australia from Europe. To this end we build models of tourism demand which take into consideration the factors influencing tourism suggested by the literature. Our aim is to model total tourism flows from all European countries, as well as from the three largest providers of European visitors to Australia. Furthermore, we break down ‘total visits' into those visits for ‘holiday reasons' and ‘visiting relatives’; this gives us 12 different models to consider. Our analysis leads us to conclude that, in the case of all visits, whereas there is little difference between the all-Europe model and the UK model, there are important differences between these two models and the Germany and Italy models. A different pattern of results emerges when models of ‘holiday visits' and ‘visiting relatives' are regression tested for the all-Europe and country-specific models. The all-Europe models are then used for forecasting purposes and achieve mixed success.

What Attracts tourists to Paradise?

“…Gonzales and Moral (1995), Cunha (2001), Tse (1999) and Lathiras and Siriopoulos (1998) all note that tourism spending is the most appropriate measure of tourism demand; simply using the number of tourist arrivals ignores the importance of duration and spending behavior. However, according to Crouch and Shaw (1992), almost 70 percent of the studies that estimate tourism demand functions have used the number of visitors as the dependent variable since data on tourism spending are less frequent and reliable (see Qui and Zhand, 1995;Morris et al, 1995;Kulendran, 1996;and Akis, 1998). Ledesma-Rodriquez and Navarro-Ibanez (2001) use the number of visitors lodged (housed overnight) in the destination country as the dependent variable in a panel study of the demand for tourism.…”

A fractionally integrated autoregressive moving average approach to forecasting tourism demand

“…The literature on modelling and forecasting tourism is huge. It includes approaches based on regression models, which to a large extent had been examined by Leob (1982), Uysal and Crompton (1985), Witt and Martin (1987), Crouch, Schultz, and Valerio (1992), Admowicz (1994), Morris, Wilson, and Bakalis (1995), Malenberg and Van Soest (1996), Kulendran and King (1997), and Song and Witt (2006). Other authors such as Geurts and Ibrahim (1975), Choy (1984), Van Doorn (1984), Martin and Witt (1989), Chan (1993), Chan, Hui, and Yuen (1999), Witt, Witt, and Wilson (1994), Turner, Kulendran, and Pergat (1995), Turner, Kulendran, and Fernando (1997), Garcia-Ferrer and Queralt (1997), Chu (1998a, b), Kim (1999), McAleer (2001, 2002), Goh and Law (2002), Gustavsson and Nordstro¨m (2001), Bra¨nna¨s, Hellstro¨m, and Nordstro¨m (2002), Chu (2004), and Gil-Alana (2005) use pure time-series analytical models.…”

International tourism specialisation of small countries

“…Tourism demand can be measured by a multitude of variables including tourist arrivals, overnight stays, real revenues, real expenditures and visits per head of the origin's population. In the literature, most studies have attempted to model tourism demand either within a time-series framework (both singleequation models and system of equations models) or within gravity type models.Single-equation models have been adopted by Loeb (1982), Uysal and Crompton (1984), Martin and Witt (1989), Crouch et al (1992), Chan (1993), Morley (1994), Morris (1995) and Walsh (1996). These authors have used leastsquare regressions to compute the level of tourist arrivals in a particular country as a linear function of the factors (such as income, price and special events) that can be thought to determine arrivals.…”