Attraction Indexes Estimation of Asian Countries and Regions by Number of Foreign Tourists: Application of Inverse Method Using Destination Choice Ratios

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the attraction indexes to identify the positions of Asian Countries and Regions in international tourism. Firstly, the probabilities of destination choice are calculated by the Origin-Destination matrices by the data of World Tourism Organization of United Nations from 1995 to 2008. Secondly, attraction indexes of each countries and regions are estimated by inverse problem of minimum of Sum of Squared Error between actual values and estimations by Huff model. It is possible to identify the trends of attraction indexes and to make a relative comparison by this analysis. It is also able to find the position of each countries and regions by positioning map for the identification of competition in Asian international tourism.