2013 Volume 21 Pages 109-117
The Great East Japan Earthquake struck Tohoku, Japan seriously, and caused deadly tsunami wide-spreading the whole east Japan coast. Soon after this earthquake, the inbound tourist arrivals to Japan went down dramatically. The purpose of this study is to examine how severe the impact of the disaster on inbound tourism demand and estimate whether tourist arrivals have recovered to normal up to November 2012 by applying auto-regression integrated moving average (ARIMA) models incorporating one-off events to estimate inbound tourist arrivals after the disaster and, then compare the predicted data with actual ones. This work will be useful for understanding the impact and tourism recovery process after the earthquake. It is also applicable and shed light on the estimation of tourism recovery level for other disasters.
