My Best Estimate – A Collaborative Short-Term Forecasting Tool for Tourism
With the aim of supporting ECM members with the task of data analysis, a new section has been created within the TourMIS system by Prof. Karl Wöber to provide short-term forecasts of tourism flows.
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My Best Estimate is a tool supporting the completion of collaborative forecast tasks, aimed at predicting future developments in tourism demand for a destination in the short-term. The tool is available in TourMIS (www.tourmis.info), the online marketing information system which offers free access to tourism statistics and marketing data.
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With My Best Estimate, TourMIS provides the necessary support to generate individual forecasts for one or several destinations, in which the user has expertise. The support provided by TourMIS is twofold: the system allows the combination of users’ judgments with statistical models’ forecasts, to obtain a prediction incorporating qualitative and recent information about future events; then it aggregates the estimates provided by experts from different sectors (e.g. from tourism organisations, the hotel industry, etc.).
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The use of My Best Estimate does not require specific statistical knowledge, since TourMIS automatically calculates the output of two approved quantitative forecast methods, namely Naïve 2 (the forecast is the relative change of the last available periods) and Exponential Smoothing for seasonal data (‘Winters method’ – the forecast is based on the actual development of the past three years).
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TourMIS users can produce estimates based on their ‘pure’ judgment, adjust the result suggested by the selected statistical model or accept it as the best estimate for the upcoming months. TourMIS users can save their estimates in the system for the current and the following two months by the means of a user-friendly interface (see fig. 1).
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The system stores each user’s estimate and compares it with the actual value of visitors, as soon as this is made available in the system. My Best Estimate recognises which users regularly provide the most accurate predictions and aggregates them in a cumulative result, assigning a higher weight to the users providing the most reliable estimates.
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To access My Best Estimate visit the URL www.tourmis.info, log in and click on the link ‘Latest Trends’ from the menu City Tourism in Europe on the left-hand side. Once you are redirected to the summary report page, click on the link ‘My Best Estimate’ to reach the screen in fig. 1.
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You can also learn more about this tool at ECM Spring Meeting during a special workhop session dedicated to My Best Estimate.
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Valeria Croce
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Researcher & Lecturer
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Modul University Vienna
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