Forecasting tourist arrivals in Langkawi Island: a time series analysis

Langkawi, a renowned island in Malaysia, is one of the country's main tourist attractions celebrated for its natural beauty and unique features. The Covid-19 pandemic significantly affected global travel, causing major disruptions and a sharp decline in tourist arrivals. To support economic recovery and strategic planning, the state government of Kedah has launched the Visiting Kedah 2025 programme to encourage tourism, especially to Langkawi. Given this context, it is reasonable to forecast an increase in tourist arrivals to Langkawi by 2025. Hence, this study aims to analyse the tourist arrival pattern, identify the best forecasting model, and provide monthly forecast value for tourist arrivals in Langkawi for the next 13 months. Therefore, the number of tourist arrivals is modelled and forecasted using the Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA) model to have a better understanding towards the trend pattern. This study used the data set of the number of tourist arrivals for both domestic and international arrivals from January 2010 until June 2024, which was obtained from the official website of the Langkawi Development Authority (LADA). The best model was chosen based on the lowest value of Akaike’s Information Criterion (AIC) and Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC). The SARIMA (0,1,1) (0,1,1)12 model was chosen to be the most suitable for forecasting the tourist arrivals in Langkawi from July 2024 to July 2025. Based on the findings, the forecast value for the number of tourist arrivals is projected to rise from 239067.7 in July 2024 to 246778.0 in July 2025.