Modeling and Forecasting the Volatility of Long-stay Tourist Arrivals

Although volatility is an important characteristic of tourism economies, it has not received a lot of attention from regional researchers. Volatility in monthly international tourist arrivals is defined as the squared deviation from mean monthly international tourist arrivals and is akin to the standard deviation, which is a common measure of financial risk. Conditional volatility in monthly tourist arrivals are primarily due to unanticipated events, such as natural disasters, crime, the threat of terrorism, and business cycles in tourist source countries. This study exploits recent volatility modelling techniques to measure and investigate the implications of conditional volatility in monthly international tourist arrivals from major tourism source markets.