Daily tourism demand forecasting before and during COVID-19: data predictivity and an improved decomposition-ensemble framework

The global tourism industry is struggling to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. During the COVID-19 pandemic, daily tourism forecasting is more critical than ever before in supporting decisions and planning. Considering the changes in tourist psyche and behaviour caused by COVID-19, this study attempts to investigate whether the statistical modelling methods can work reliably under the new normal when travel restrictions are eased or lifted. To this end, we first compare the predictivity of daily tourism demand data before and during COVID-19, and observe heterogeneous impacts across different geographical scales. Then an improved multivariate & multiscale decomposition-ensemble framework is proposed to forecast daily tourism demand. The empirical study indicates the superiority and practicability of the proposed framework before and during COVID-19. Finally, we call for more research on the comparability of tourism demand forecasting.