Application of Google Trends to Forecast Tourism Demand

Abstract

Internet becomes a necessity in our modern lives. The rapid growth of Internet’s popularity results in a huge amount of data. Hence, big data analytics is on its berth to handle the data. One interesting research track of the big data literature focuses on “search engine data.” The analysis the search engine data is valuable because the business intelligence generated from the analysis offers insights for business opportunities. Google Trends is a popular target for studying search engine data, because it is readily available and easy to access. Because analyzing and forecasting things based on Google Trends can help various domain problems, this study proposes a systematic approach to obtain Google Trends search engine data, to explore usage of the data, and then to provide a forecast. We use Taiwan tourism demand as a study target, where both estimation and forecasting are done by our proposed method. The forecasting results are then compared with real data from the Taiwan Tourism Bureau.