Forecasting international conference attendance

There are many tourism modelling/forecasting studies, but most of these are concerned with holiday tourism or total tourism (ie not disaggregated by visit purpose); conference tourism is virtually ignored. In this paper, an econometric model which explains tourism demand for an international conference is developed. The model is specified in logistic form and is estimated using maximum likelihood techniques. Various alternative forms of the model are considered. For the forecasting model selected, good empirical results are obtained in terms of model fit, and, in contrast with previous (non-conference) tourism forecasting findings, the forecasts generated by the econometric model are more accurate than random walk forecasts.