FORECASTING INTERNATIONAL-CONFERENCE ATTENDANCE

There are many tourism modelling/forecasting studies, but most of thes e are concerned with holiday tourism or total tourism (ie not disaggre gated by visit purpose); conference tourism is virtually ignored. In t his paper, an econometric model which explains tourism demand for an i nternational conference is developed. The model is specified in logist ic form and is estimated using maximum likelihood techniques. Various alternative forms of the model are considered. For the forecasting mod el selected, good empirical results are obtained in terms of model fit , and, in contrast with previous (non-conference) tourism forecasting findings, the forecasts generated by the econometric model are more ac curate than random walk forecasts.