Modeling tourism demand by neural networks techniques

In spite of the widely development of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), tourism researchers have not been paid enough attention. The published articles on ANN are very limited in tourism literature. In the tourism industry, planning is very crucial because of the rapid economic and political changes, increased operational complexity, and complicated tourism businesses. Accurate forecasts of tourism demand are very important for effective planning by all providers of services and products in tourism. In this paper is attempted to model the tourist demand using an ANN model which has as inputs various factors that can influence the tourism demand. The output of the model is the tourism demand. The estimation and validation data concerns the Greek tourism industry. The model is tested with real data and the results are very encouraged.