Monday, August 20, 2018

Using Facebook Likes and Google Trends data to forecast tourism

This post is guest authored by Ulrich Gunter, Irem Önder, Stefan Gindl, all from MODUL University Vienna, and edited by the EViews team.  (Note: all images on this post are for illustrative purposes only; are not taken from the published article and do not represent the exact analysis performed for the article). 

A recent article, "Exploring the predictive ability of LIKES of posts on the Facebook pages of four major city DMOs in Austria" in the scholarly journal Tourism Economics investigates the predictive ability of Facebook “likes” and Google Trends data on tourist arrivals in four major Austrian cities.  The use of online “big data” to perform short term forecasts or nowcasts is becoming increasingly important across all branches of economic study, but is particularly powerful in tourism economics.