Impacts of the Financial and Economic Crisis on Tourism in Asia

The purpose of this study is to forecast inbound tourism to Asia and outbound tourism from Asia by considering the possible impacts of the current financial and economic crisis. The autoregressive distributed lag model is used to calculate the interval demand elasticities, which are then used to generate interval forecasts for inbound tourism to and outbound tourism from Asia. Interval forecasts reduce the risk of complete forecasting failure arising from the uncertainties associated with the crisis. The forecast results suggest that the financial and economic crisis will have a negative impact on both inbound and outbound tourism in Asia but the demand will rebound from 2010.