Forecasting the Number of Hotel Guests in Chon Buri Province Under the COVID-19 Pandemic Situation by Using Simple Moving Average Methods and Exponential Smoothing Methods

Abstract

The objectives of the research were to study the comparison of the performance of the forecasting methods and the forecast of the number of hotel guests in Chon Buri Province under the COVID-19 pandemic situation. The data used in the study were the number of monthly hotel guests in Chon Buri province from January 2020 to December 2021. The forecasting method used in the study consisted of simple moving average methods and exponential smoothing methods. The values ​​used to determine the performance comprised a mean absolute deviation (MAD) and root of mean square error (RMSE). The research results showed that the most appropriate performance method in this study was the exponential smoothing method with a damping factor (1-alpha) = 0.05. The forecast showed that the number of guests in January 2022 would be higher than the January-November 2021 period.