IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/anture/v116y2026ics0160738325002051.html

Post-pandemic tourism forecasting with ensemble RNN

Author

Listed:
  • Tan, Zhi Qin
  • Li, Yunpeng

Abstract

Tourism forecasting plays a critical role in the tourism industry, enabling strategic planning for diverse stakeholders. However, it is a challenging task influenced by numerous factors. This study investigates the development of automated, data-driven approaches, by introducing an ensemble model that combines two forecasting methods of recurrent neural networks. It integrates COVID-19-related explanatory variables and automatically learns the spatial relationship across destinations. The model outperformed benchmark methods in forecasting China's outbound tourism to twenty destinations before and during COVID-19, using data from 1989 to 2022. Subsequently, our approach achieved 1.4723 mean absolute scaled error and third runner-up for the Point Forecasting Track in Tourism Forecasting Competition amid COVID-19 Round II, for the forecast period between August 2023 and July 2024.

Suggested Citation

  • Tan, Zhi Qin & Li, Yunpeng, 2026. "Post-pandemic tourism forecasting with ensemble RNN," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 116(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:anture:v:116:y:2026:i:c:s0160738325002051
    DOI: 10.1016/j.annals.2025.104099
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160738325002051
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.annals.2025.104099?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Liu, Anyu & Vici, Laura & Ramos, Vicente & Giannoni, Sauveur & Blake, Adam, 2021. "Visitor arrivals forecasts amid COVID-19: A perspective from the Europe team," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 88(C).
    2. Peng, Bo & Song, Haiyan & Crouch, Geoffrey I., 2014. "A meta-analysis of international tourism demand forecasting and implications for practice," Tourism Management, Elsevier, vol. 45(C), pages 181-193.
    3. Thomas Hale & Noam Angrist & Rafael Goldszmidt & Beatriz Kira & Anna Petherick & Toby Phillips & Samuel Webster & Emily Cameron-Blake & Laura Hallas & Saptarshi Majumdar & Helen Tatlow, 2021. "A global panel database of pandemic policies (Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker)," Nature Human Behaviour, Nature, vol. 5(4), pages 529-538, April.
    4. Li, Cheng & Ge, Peng & Liu, Zhusheng & Zheng, Weimin, 2020. "Forecasting tourist arrivals using denoising and potential factors," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 83(C).
    5. Li, Xin & Xu, Yechi & Law, Rob & Wang, Shouyang, 2024. "Enhancing Tourism Demand Forecasting with a Transformer-based Framework," SocArXiv 5ezn3_v1, Center for Open Science.
    6. Ji Wu & Xian Cheng & Stephen Shaoyi Liao, 2020. "Tourism forecast combination using the stochastic frontier analysis technique," Tourism Economics, , vol. 26(7), pages 1086-1107, November.
    7. Doris Chenguang Wu & Shiteng Zhong & Richard T R Qiu & Ji Wu, 2022. "Are customer reviews just reviews? Hotel forecasting using sentiment analysis," Tourism Economics, , vol. 28(3), pages 795-816, May.
    8. Bangwayo-Skeete, Prosper F. & Skeete, Ryan W., 2015. "Can Google data improve the forecasting performance of tourist arrivals? Mixed-data sampling approach," Tourism Management, Elsevier, vol. 46(C), pages 454-464.
    9. Kourentzes, Nikolaos & Saayman, Andrea & Jean-Pierre, Philippe & Provenzano, Davide & Sahli, Mondher & Seetaram, Neelu & Volo, Serena, 2021. "Visitor arrivals forecasts amid COVID-19: A perspective from the Africa team," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 88(C).
    10. Eugenio-Martin, Juan L. & Cazorla-Artiles, José M. & Moreda, Adela & Murguia, Juan M., 2023. "Adaptive nowcasting of arrivals during health crises," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 101(C).
    11. Li, Hengyun & Guo, Honggang & Wang, Jianzhou & Wang, Yong & Wu, Chunying, 2025. "Tourism combination forecasting with swarm intelligence," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 111(C).
    12. Li, Xin & Xu, Yechi & Law, Rob & Wang, Shouyang, 2024. "Enhancing tourism demand forecasting with a transformer-based framework," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 107(C).
    13. Li, Hengyun & Hu, Mingming & Li, Gang, 2020. "Forecasting tourism demand with multisource big data," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 83(C).
    14. Hassani, Hossein & Silva, Emmanuel Sirimal & Antonakakis, Nikolaos & Filis, George & Gupta, Rangan, 2017. "Forecasting accuracy evaluation of tourist arrivals," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 63(C), pages 112-127.
    15. He, Ling-Yang & Li, Hui & Bi, Jian-Wu & Yang, Jing-Jing & Zhou, Qing, 2022. "The impact of public health emergencies on hotel demand - Estimation from a new foresight perspective on the COVID-19," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 94(C).
    16. Bi, Jian-Wu & Liu, Yang & Li, Hui, 2020. "Daily tourism volume forecasting for tourist attractions," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 83(C).
    17. Qiu, Richard T.R. & Wu, Doris Chenguang & Dropsy, Vincent & Petit, Sylvain & Pratt, Stephen & Ohe, Yasuo, 2021. "Visitor arrivals forecasts amid COVID-19: A perspective from the Asia and Pacific team," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 88(C).
    18. Xie, Gang & Qian, Yatong & Wang, Shouyang, 2020. "A decomposition-ensemble approach for tourism forecasting," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 81(C).
    19. Anyu Liu & Laura Vici & Vicente Ramos & Sauveur Giannoni & Adam Blake, 2021. "Visitor arrivals forecasts amid COVID-19: A perspective from the Europe team," Post-Print hal-04653783, HAL.
    20. Jiao, Xiaoying & Li, Gang & Chen, Jason Li, 2020. "Forecasting international tourism demand: a local spatiotemporal model," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 83(C).
    21. Yang, Yang & Fan, Yawen & Jiang, Lan & Liu, Xiaohui, 2022. "Search query and tourism forecasting during the pandemic: When and where can digital footprints be helpful as predictors?," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 93(C).
    22. Li, Gang & Wu, Doris Chenguang & Zhou, Menglin & Liu, Anyu, 2019. "The combination of interval forecasts in tourism," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 75(C), pages 363-378.
    23. Xu, Jian & Zhang, Wei & Li, Hengyun & Zheng, Xiang (Kevin) & Zhang, Jing, 2024. "User-generated photos in hotel demand forecasting," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 108(C).
    24. Yang, Yang & Zhang, Honglei, 2019. "Spatial-temporal forecasting of tourism demand," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 75(C), pages 106-119.
    25. Liu, Han & Chen, Yuxiu & Hu, Mingming & Chen, Jason Li, 2025. "Forecast by mixed-frequency dynamic panel model," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 110(C).
    26. Zheng, Weimin & Huang, Liyao & Lin, Zhibin, 2021. "Multi-attraction, hourly tourism demand forecasting," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 90(C).
    27. Guan, Bo & Silva, Emmanuel Sirimal & Hassani, Hossein & Heravi, Saeed, 2022. "Forecasting tourism growth with State-Dependent Models," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 94(C).
    28. Zhang, Hanyuan & Song, Haiyan & Wen, Long & Liu, Chang, 2021. "Forecasting tourism recovery amid COVID-19," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 87(C).
    29. Gunter, Ulrich & Önder, Irem, 2016. "Forecasting city arrivals with Google Analytics," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 61(C), pages 199-212.
    30. Hyndman, Rob J. & Koehler, Anne B., 2006. "Another look at measures of forecast accuracy," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 22(4), pages 679-688.
    31. Gao, Huicai & Li, Hengyun & Zhang, Chen Jason, 2025. "Time and feature varying tourism demand forecasting," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 112(C).
    32. Li, Hengyun & Gao, Huicai & Song, Haiyan, 2023. "Tourism forecasting with granular sentiment analysis," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 103(C).
    33. Llewellyn, Mary & Ross, Gordon & Ryan-Saha, Joshua, 2023. "COVID-era forecasting: Google trends and window and model averaging," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 103(C).
    34. Fotiadis, Anestis & Polyzos, Stathis & Huan, Tzung-Cheng T.C., 2021. "The good, the bad and the ugly on COVID-19 tourism recovery," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 87(C).
    35. Lim, Bryan & Arık, Sercan Ö. & Loeff, Nicolas & Pfister, Tomas, 2021. "Temporal Fusion Transformers for interpretable multi-horizon time series forecasting," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 37(4), pages 1748-1764.
    36. Pan, Mengqiang & Liao, Zhixue & Wang, Zhouyiying & Ren, Chi & Xing, Zhibin & Li, Wenyong, 2025. "Tourism forecasting: A dynamic spatiotemporal model," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 110(C).
    37. Park, Eunhye & Park, Jinah & Hu, Mingming, 2021. "Tourism demand forecasting with online news data mining," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 90(C).
    38. Li, Cheng & Zheng, Weimin & Ge, Peng, 2022. "Tourism demand forecasting with spatiotemporal features," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 94(C).
    39. Hu, Mingming & Dong, Na & Hu, Fang, 2024. "Tourism demand forecasting using short video information," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 109(C).
    40. Ioannis Chatziantoniou & Stavros Degiannakis & Bruno Eeckels & George Filis, 2016. "Forecasting tourist arrivals using origin country macroeconomics," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 48(27), pages 2571-2585, June.
    41. Durbin, James & Koopman, Siem Jan, 2012. "Time Series Analysis by State Space Methods," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, edition 2, number 9780199641178.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Li, Cheng & Zheng, Weimin & Ge, Peng, 2022. "Tourism demand forecasting with spatiotemporal features," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 94(C).
    2. Li, Hengyun & Guo, Honggang & Wang, Jianzhou & Wang, Yong & Wu, Chunying, 2025. "Tourism combination forecasting with swarm intelligence," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 111(C).
    3. Li, Xin & Xu, Yechi & Law, Rob & Wang, Shouyang, 2024. "Enhancing tourism demand forecasting with a transformer-based framework," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 107(C).
    4. Li, Xin & Xu, Yechi & Law, Rob & Wang, Shouyang, 2024. "Enhancing Tourism Demand Forecasting with a Transformer-based Framework," SocArXiv 5ezn3_v1, Center for Open Science.
    5. Li, Hengyun & Gao, Huicai & Song, Haiyan, 2023. "Tourism forecasting with granular sentiment analysis," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 103(C).
    6. Li, Jingrui & Xie, Weihong & Wang, Jianzhou & Gao, Jialu & Zhang, Linyue & Wang, Jiyang & Li, Shoujiang, 2026. "Forecasting tourism recovery with multifactor insights – A case of post-pandemic Chinese outbound tourism," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 116(C).
    7. Xu, Shilin & Liu, Yang & Jin, Chun, 2023. "Forecasting daily tourism demand with multiple factors," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 103(C).
    8. Haodong Sun & Yang Yang & Yanyan Chen & Xiaoming Liu & Jiachen Wang, 2023. "Tourism demand forecasting of multi-attractions with spatiotemporal grid: a convolutional block attention module model," Information Technology & Tourism, Springer, vol. 25(2), pages 205-233, June.
    9. Yang, Yang & Fan, Yawen & Jiang, Lan & Liu, Xiaohui, 2022. "Search query and tourism forecasting during the pandemic: When and where can digital footprints be helpful as predictors?," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 93(C).
    10. Mingming Hu & Haifeng Yang & Doris Chenguang Wu & Shuai Ma, 2024. "A novel two-stage combination model for tourism demand forecasting," Tourism Economics, , vol. 30(8), pages 1925-1950, December.
    11. Liu, Han & Chen, Yuxiu & Hu, Mingming & Chen, Jason Li, 2025. "Forecast by mixed-frequency dynamic panel model," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 110(C).
    12. Xi Wu & Adam Blake, 2023. "The Impact of the COVID-19 Crisis on Air Travel Demand: Some Evidence From China," SAGE Open, , vol. 13(1), pages 21582440231, January.
    13. Zhang, Hanyuan & Liu, Ying & Liu, Xinyang & Liu, Anyu & Lin, Vera Shanshan, 2026. "Forecasting Chinese outbound tourism recovery: A Triple-layer forecast combination framework," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 116(C).
    14. Jiao, Xiaoying & Chen, Jason Li & Li, Gang, 2021. "Forecasting tourism demand: Developing a general nesting spatiotemporal model," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 90(C).
    15. Pan, Mengqiang & Liao, Zhixue & Wang, Zhouyiying & Ren, Chi & Xing, Zhibin & Li, Wenyong, 2025. "Tourism forecasting: A dynamic spatiotemporal model," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 110(C).
    16. Dong Zhang & Pengkun Wu & Chong Wu & Eric W. T. Ngai, 2024. "Forecasting duty-free shopping demand with multisource data: a deep learning approach," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 339(1), pages 861-887, August.
    17. Ulrich Gunter, 2021. "Improving Hotel Room Demand Forecasts for Vienna across Hotel Classes and Forecast Horizons: Single Models and Combination Techniques Based on Encompassing Tests," Forecasting, MDPI, vol. 3(4), pages 1-36, November.
    18. Xi Wu & Adam Blake, 2023. "Does the combination of models with different explanatory variables improve tourism demand forecasting performance?," Tourism Economics, , vol. 29(8), pages 2032-2056, December.
    19. Edmond H. C. Wu & Jihao Hu & Rui Chen, 2022. "Monitoring and forecasting COVID-19 impacts on hotel occupancy rates with daily visitor arrivals and search queries," Current Issues in Tourism, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 25(3), pages 490-507, February.
    20. Xu, Jian & Zhang, Wei & Li, Hengyun & Zheng, Xiang (Kevin) & Zhang, Jing, 2024. "User-generated photos in hotel demand forecasting," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 108(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:anture:v:116:y:2026:i:c:s0160738325002051. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/annals-of-tourism-research/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.