Forecasting methods in Greek coastal shipping : the case of Southwest Crete

The aim of this paper is to exact the most effective model at capturing the seasonal and short-term components of passenger traffic in Southwest Crete coastal shipping. There has been no similar effort in the past. The passenger traffic forecast is crucial for the public and private sector, as it is necessary for decision making. In our analysis we considered the six largest ports of Southwest Crete. The seasonal repeated fluctuations and the quarterly observations made Winter's triple exponential smoothing, time series decomposition, simple seasonal model, seasonal ARIMA model and Lis' simplistic forecast suitable for our case. The results showed that in four of the six ports the Winters' method is best adapted. The port of Gavdos adapts better to the decomposition method and the port of Sougia to Li's method. No port led, through the seasonal ARIMA models or simple seasonal model, to better results. In most cases, traffic trend did not change over time, the seasonal component significantly affected the time series, and the time series smoothing was strong.