Following China’s announcement of the new optimizing COVID-19 rules in late 2022, outbound tourism bookings have been booming. China was the biggest outbound travel market before the pandemic, and the recovery of this market has profound impacts on many destinations. DOMs and the travel industry around the world are keen to learn about the prediction of this market’s recovery. The academic community of tourism forecasting is obliged to offer intellectual support to the global tourism industry.
In 2021, the Curated Collection of Tourism Demand Forecasting of Annals of Tourism Research organised the first round of tourism forecasting competition amid COVID-19, and published the outcomes of the three international participating teams in the curated collection. This competition was very successful and attracted broad interests both within and beyond the academic community. The outcomes of the competition were further presented at the International Association for Tourism Economics conference in July 2022. Each of the three publications has obtained many citations and the one by the Asia and Pacific team (Qiu et al., 2021) has been ranked “the highly cited paper” by SSCI with 38 citations.
This competition attracted nearly 20 forecasting scholars who formed three international teams; it represented an initial attempt in exploring tourism forecasting amid a crisis; some innovative methodologies were proposed, but there is still scope for further improvements of these methods, in order to produce more accurate ex ante forecasts in a crisis situation, and forecasting of demand recovery from a crisis has yet to be explored. In addition, the forecasting methods applied were mostly time-series and econometric forecasting models; the latest developments of artificial intelligence (AI), such as machine learning/deep learning techniques, have not been fully implemented in this competition.
Based on the successful experience of organising the first round of tourism forecasting competition amid COVID-19, Curated Collection of Tourism Demand Forecasting of Annals of Tourism Research, together with the Tourism and Hospitality section of the International Institute of Forecasters jointly call for the second round of tourism forecasting competition amid COVID-19, with a particular focus on the recovery of the Chinese outbound market.
With an enthusiastic response, more than 40 international teams showed their interest in participating in this competition. As of the deadline of July 31st, a total of 25 teams have successfully completed the designated task. To learn about the participating teams, their distinct forecasting methodologies and outcomes, please visit the Teams page.
As the assessment period progresses, the website will update regularly once the actual data have become available, revealing the periodic forecasting accuracies and dynamic rankings of each participating team on the Results page. This iterative disclosure will continue until the assessment period concludes, and the overall winners will be announced accordingly.