Forecasting hotel demand uncertainty using time series Bayesian VAR models

Abstract

Demand uncertainty is a fundamental characteristic of the hospitality industry. Hotel room inventory is fixed, and devising an accurate daily demand measurement is a key operational challenge. In practice, it is difficult to predict the industry stability and capture demand uncertainty, so the industry relies on demand estimates. This process of estimation affects revenue maximization, as it is sensitive to incremental costs. In this article, we implemented vector autoregressive (VAR) models and compared them to the Bayesian VAR to examine the accuracy of predicting demand. We evaluated the results using a new measure of forecasting accuracy, the mean arctangent absolute percentage error (MAAPE). The results generated from the forecasts confirm the significant improvement in forecasting performance that can be obtained using the Bayesian model. It is noteworthy that the VAR performs the best for the lower horizons. The results also suggest that MAAPE outperforms other existing accuracy measures, in terms of error rates.