IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/toueco/v31y2025i4p579-592.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A novel suggestion on how to adequately treat stochastic non-stationary seasonality in tourism export forecasting

Author

Listed:
  • Ulrich Gunter
  • Egon Smeral

Abstract

Using a quarterly data sample of 28 EU countries ranging from 2004Q1 to 2016Q4, real tourism exports are modeled and estimated as a function of relative tourism export prices and aggregate real GDP. For almost all countries, HEGY tests applied to first-differenced variables cannot reject the null hypothesis of the presence of seasonal unit roots. Seasonal differencing would be necessary to remove the seasonal patterns from the data, yet employing seasonally differenced data results in information loss, distorted elasticity estimates, and mediocre forecast accuracy. Our suggestion is therefore to perform estimation and forecasting for each quarter separately. This approach avoids the use of seasonal differencing, results in plausible, seasonally varying estimates of income elasticities, and yields statistically significantly superior forecast accuracy, also in comparison to two data-driven benchmarks for seasonal data (i.e., SARIMA and ETS).

Suggested Citation

  • Ulrich Gunter & Egon Smeral, 2025. "A novel suggestion on how to adequately treat stochastic non-stationary seasonality in tourism export forecasting," Tourism Economics, , vol. 31(4), pages 579-592, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:toueco:v:31:y:2025:i:4:p:579-592
    DOI: 10.1177/13548166241273584
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13548166241273584
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/13548166241273584?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
    ---><---

    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:sae:toueco:v:31:y:2025:i:4:p:579-592. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    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.