Nowcasting Tourist Arrivals to Barbados - Just Google It!

This paper uses support vector regressions (SVRs) and Google search data to test whether observing internet habits can provide insights on trends in tourist arrivals to Barbados. We find evidence that Google Trends data may be used to (informally) pick up changing patterns and trends in tourist arrivals from the UK and Canada. But while graphical analysis show some similar patterns in the Google data and reported data on US arrivals, we find no evidence to suggest that Google data adds any significant information to what can be learned from an autoregressive-SVR