Forecasting Australia’s international arrivals with climate indices

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of climate on marine and urban tourism using climate indices in four of Australia’s busiest cities: Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. Climate is operationalized using the previously validated Holiday Climate Index (HCI)-beach for marine tourism HCI-urban for city tourism; international airport arrivals are the tourism behavior of interest.

Design/methodology/approach

HCI-beach and-urban indices were calculated using climate data: thermal comfort, cloud cover, windspeed and precipitation. Autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models were calculated for airport arrivals only and airport arrivals with exogenous factors (i.e. HCI-beach and-urban).

Findings

Indices proved significant for each city where HCI-urban scores were more favorable on the aggregate than HCI-beach scores. HCI-beach improved model accuracy in Melbourne (3.11%), Sydney (15.77%) and Perth (37.38%); HCI-urban improved accuracy at Brisbane by 37.73%.

Research limitations/implications

The primary limitation is that airport arrival data was only available monthly. Using aggregated arrivals also precludes explicitly determining recreational intentions among travelers.

Practical implications

Results demonstrate climate indices can improve forecast accuracy for actual tourism behaviors, including destination arrivals.

Social implications

For tourists, results demonstrate the meteorological season and city where climate conditions are more or less favorable.

Originality/value

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first known study to investigate the influence of climate indices on improving predictability of international arrival forecasts.