Tourism forecasting: Accuracy comparisons across aggregated/disaggregated data

The purpose of this article is to examine empirically the impact of aggregation on forecasting accuracy; specifically, whether more accurate forecasts are obtained by forecasting a number of disaggregated tourist flows and summing the forecasts to obtain the aggregate forecast, or by summing the disaggregated tourist flows and forecasting the aggregate series directly. On the one hand, it may be easier to produce accurate forecasts from disaggregated series as the latter allow for differing behavioural patterns which may be more readily recognisable and hence easier to model and extrapolate. On the other hand, more aggregate series may be less susceptible to “noise” and therefore easier to forecast.