Practical tourism forecasting D.C. Frechtling, 1996.pdf

296 book reviews international journal of forecasting 13 1997 293 301 apart from the ciret section all information may be accessed in a variety of ways each facilitated by specific indexes the primary index lists all par ticipating organisations with page references to the two main sections secondary indexes are a coun try index listing organisations providing information by country an exchange rate index eight key currencies an interest rate index and a com modities and other specialist subjects index sec ondary indexes provide the user with a list of organisations offering the relevant services which may be used in conjunction with the main organisa tion index the index system is efficient and con sistent the section on ciret is less well integrated and consists of a brief organisational overview plus an inadequate description of the 30 page synoptic table the table describes economic surveys by country and includes publication name in the native language obscuring a useful source of information from non linguists not all organisations mentioned in the synoptic table are included in the organi sational index the wief introduction promises an article by werner strigel and ziegler entitled cycli cal business and consumer surveys the current state of the art which summarises the world of economic surveys and presumably the operations of ciret but to the detriment of this section it is not included anywhere in the wief the introduction by fildes provides a wide sum mary of the state of economic forecasting at present and is realistically negative about historical forecast accuracy and indeed the reliability of current fore casts it can be shown that the choice of exogenous assumptions is used by model builders to in fluence their forecasts subjectively p 7 the extent to which most forecasts are conditional on government policy is sensibly included but dis cussion is limited fildes summary is to some extent the victim of its own brevity offering extensive coverage but scant detail it is however indispensable as a check list for the seasoned researcher and an excellent intro duction to the student many seminal papers are referenced providing a useful bibliography for stu dent and researcher alike a survey amongst 670 individual members of the society for business economists was undertaken to elicit users views on sources and uses of macro economic forecasts providing some enlightening results however a limited response rate 71 respon dents and the possibility of self selection bias amongst respondents throws doubt on many of the findings acknowledged by the author overall the wief is unique in its coverage and invaluable to any researcher active in the field of economics the section on ciret could be rendered more accessible and at the risk of increasing the already substantial size of this volume a partial index for the main text sections and key players in the field of forecasting and surveys may provide a useful addition nick butler department of economics kingston university some macroeconomic forecasts are so inaccu rate that they can not be used to improve on forecasts based on industry or company data alone p 4 pii s0169 2070 96 00729 7 fildes includes sections summarising the main ana lytical techniques used by forecasters including vector auto regressions vars and arima modelling plus the role of these techniques as benchmarks for alternative modelling techniques the counter intuitive conclusion that ex ante fore casts often seem more accurate then their ex post counterparts is nicely summarised d c frechtling practical tourism forecasting 1996 butterworth heineman oxford 240 pp softcover isbn 0 7506 0877 3 this book is the first attempt since 1992 witt and witt 1992 to write a forecasting text for the tourism industry as such the book has a potentially signifi cant role to play in fact the book has quite limited book reviews international journal of forecasting 13 1997 293 301 297 objectives covering only the elementary forecasting methods up to box jenkins analysis and is aimed at a limited audience of marketing strategic business and transport planners the word practical in the title could be interpreted equally as introductory the issue of the title is important as many readers may be expecting more breadth and depth than this book intends as a teaching book it is most suitable for post graduate business courses where there is a need to examine forecasting issues in the tourism industry the book has an interesting and well thought out structure beginning with a clear introduction to what the book is about what tourism forecasting is and what it involves chapter two covers forecast evaluation in a simple original and clear manner chapter three looks at the forecasting process chapter four introduces the basic time series meth ods of naive moving average and decomposition methods chapter five includes exponential models and autoregression chapter 6 covers the basic box jenkins approach and does this section more clearly than some large well known texts in chapters seven and eight the book turns to causal methods and focuses upon simple multiple and structural regres sion chapter 9 looks at qualitative approaches with most emphasis on the delphi method chapter ten is a conclusion which has some interesting summary statements about basic tourism forecasting principles some useful elementary methods are not covered such as holt and winters exponential smoothing and logit and probit regression the issue of seasonality which is basic to most travel series is only lightly covered given the emphasis perhaps overly so by many current business analysts of using deseasonal ised series the issue needs more debate and this could have been followed up in the box jenkins section with discussion of x 11 more importantly a lot more could have been attempted for such an important industry sector for example a discussion of the current use of co integration analysis is essential other potentially important advances in tourism forecasting have involved the use of inter vention analysis and the use of innovation diffusion the book is well written and has an excellent free flowing style which is comfortable to read and suitable for students industry managers with little forecasting background would gain much from read ing the book in particular what to look for in evaluating a tourism forecasting report however for managers with aquantitative training the book is insufficient in failing to discuss the latest methods references witt s f witt c a 1992 modeling and forecasting demand in tourism academic press l w turner victoria university of technology australia pi1 s0169 2070 97 00009 5 j a m heijke ed 1994 forecasting the labour market by occupation and education the forecast ing activities of three european labour market research institutes norwell ma kluwer academic publishers xvi 210 pp isbn 0 7923 9447 x this book presents nine papers from a 1992 conference of labor market 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