Does Complexity Matter? Methods for Improving Forecasting Accuracy in Tourism: The Case of Austria

Tourist demand is subject to considerable variations, a fact that aggravates the development of forecast models of sufficiently adequate accuracy. This study develops models that permit including most, if not all, factors of influence. To this end, due consideration was given to calendar effects as well as unknown special effects in time-series models and econometric approaches in an attempt to improve the quality of the forecast. Results showed that, for the data set used, a combination of complex data adjustment procedures and adequate model structures substantially improved the accuracy of the forecast, or, in other words, that simple approaches lose out to more complex ones. Accordingly, the central issue of this study, that is, whether complexity matters, can certainly be answered quite simply for the Austrian data set used by “Yes, it does.”