Forecasting The Number Of Foreign Visitors In Bulgaria With Recreation And Holiday Aims

At the present seven years the Bulgarian tourism industry has reached a stage not just of a positive growth but also of a true bubbling. And this provides not only opportunities but also threats to the development of the Bulgaria’s tourism companies. An economic myopia at this stage of development could later be paid at a very high price by the Bulgarian tourism sector. Therefore, the necessity of the modern tourism industry to perform more flexibly to the surrounding business environment in both national and global scale makes the situation survey and analysis useful and practical survival tools. The present papers focus on the opportunities provided by the short-run forecasting of the arrivals of tourists. It also regards the methodology that should be used to make the forecasting in tourism more accurate and precise and the results more understandable by the Management of the tourism companies. The main short-run forecasting techniques, which are applied, include (i) trend estimation; (ii) exponential smoothing in free separate cases depending on the value of the smoothening constant; and (iii) exponential smoothening with a use of the trend value as “past forecast”. A time series and past period predictions have been constructed based on data since 1964 in order to test the forecasting methods presented in the paper.