‘ENTER Best Research Paper Award’ won by ETOUR team
The ‘ENTER Best Research Paper Award’ is given to individuals who submit outstanding research papers related to information and communication technologies in travel and tourism.
This year, the 25th annual international conference was held in Jönköping and the first place was won by a team around ETOUR Professor Matthias Fuchs and Doctor Maria Lexhagen.The prestigious ‘ENTER Best Research Paper Award’ was given to Wolfram Höpken, Tobias Eberle, Matthias Fuchs and Maria Lexhagen during the ENTER 2018 Conference on Information and Communication Technologies in Travel and Tourism 24-26 January 2018. The awarded paper is titled "Search Engine Traffic as Input for predicting tourist Arrivals".
The paper presents a novel approach that extends traditional forecasting models by considering travellers’ web search behaviour as additional input variable for predicting tourist arrivals. By doing so, the study presents a method with the capacity to identify relevant search terms and time lags between web search and tourist arrivals.
The study is conducted at the leading Swedish mountain destination Åre, using arrival data and Google web search data for the period 2005-2012. Findings demonstrate the ability of the proposed approach to outperform traditional autoregressive approaches, thus, to significantly increase the predictive power and accuracy in forecasting tourism demand.
"We would like to thank the managers Niclas Sjögren-Berg (Ski Star Åre), Peter Nilsson and Hans Ericsson (Tott Hotel Åre) and Pernilla Gravenfors (Copperhill Mountain Lodge Åre) for their excellent cooperation in this research project “Engineering the Knowledge Destination”, says Professor Matthias Fuchs.
The project is financed by KK-Foundation.