Forecast without historical data: objective tourist volume forecast model for newly developed rural tourism areas of China.

Mainstream tourist volume forecast methods generally rely on historical market data, not suitable for newly developed tourism area due to the lack of data accumulation. In view of this issue, this paper proposes an objective forecast model for newly developed rural tourism areas. It takes the characteristics of rural tourism areas into account and designs a novel modified gravity model-based method featured with destination tourism attraction variable, effective tourist origin set and parameter quantification methods, to forecast tourist volume indirectly. The empirical study results could well fit with actual tourist volume data in a rural tourism area of China, verifying the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]