Time Series Patterns of Tourist Arrivals to Sri Lanka

This study focused on pattern recognition of tourist arrivals to Sri Lanka from various regions in the world. Monthly time series data from January 2008 to December 2014 are used in this study. The regions selected for the study were the top four in market position. They are; Asia, Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Descriptive statistics, Time Series plots and Auto-Correlation Functions (ACF) were used for pattern identification and one way - Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was used for mean comparison of tourist arrivals from selected regions. The average arrivals of Asia and Western Europe are the highest 29361 and 25982 respectively. There is no significant difference between these two regions. Eastern Europe and the Middle East have 5866 and 4300 of average respectively. Arrivals from Asia, Western Europe, and Eastern Europe were not normally distributed, all were positively skewed. Data series of all four regions were non-stationary. There is a significant difference of tourist arrival from Asian and Western Europe compared to other regions. It is recommended to test Moving Average Methods, Exponential Smoothing techniques, Decomposition techniques, linear and non-linear trend models and Circular model for forecasting arrivals