ABSTRACT
Malaysia is the most crucial short-haul inbound market for Thailand. The Malaysian tourist market is a high-sharing market, and the growth rate is always encouraging as the Malaysian border is connected to southern Thailand, and transportation can be by air, land or sea. During 1996-1997, the market slowed, and then faced a serious decrease in 1998 because of the Malaysian economic crisis. In 1999, the Malaysian economy recovered, and the Malaysian tourist market subsequently prospered. In 2003, SARS caused a decrease in the number of Malaysian tourists, but the problem was soon resolved. In 2005, there were 1,373,946 Malaysian visitors to Thailand, making up 11.88 per cent of total international visitor arrivals. Most Malaysian tourists were on non-group tours, and considered Thailand a holiday destination. The average length of stay of Malaysian visitors in Thailand was 3.68 days and the average amount they spent was 3,666.72 baht per person per day, which generated an income of 18,102.07 million baht for Thai tourism (Tourism Authority of Thailand, 2005). The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the relationship between the demand for international tourism to Thailand and economic determinants, specifically the consumer price index. Autoregressive moving average with exogenous variables (ARMAX) models are used to analyse the relationships between tourist arrivals from the different countries to Thailand and the consumer price index, and to examine the effects of economic variables on the numbers of tourists to Thailand. We examine monthly tourist arrivals from three major countries of origin, namely the United States, Japan and Malaysia, which represent Thailand’s largest long-haul, medium-haul and short-haul tourism markets, respectively. The structure of the remainder of the chapter is as follows. Section 1.2 gives the methodologies used in the chapter. Section 1.3 provides the empirical results
from seasonal unit root tests and ARIMA/ARIMAX models. Some concluding remarks are presented in Section 1.4.
