Abstract:

Tourism forecasting is becoming an increasingly important activity in planning and managing the tourism industry. This study aims to forecast tourist arrivals to Sri Lanka by using quantitative methods which qualify past information about a phenomenon by applying mathematical rules which take advantage of the underlying patterns and relationships in the data.  Based on the findings a web-based system will be developed to make forecasts publicly available. Apart from providing tourist arrival forecasts this system will also work as a platform for share experts’ opinions about future flow of the tourist arrivals to further support decision making process of users.