Big Data Analytics for Forecasting Tourism Recovery in Bali Island Using Multivariate Time Series

Bali is a famous tourist area and can significantly contribute to the Indonesian tourism sector. The COVID-19 pandemic has made Indonesian tourism, including Bali tourism, experience a decline. In March 2022, COVID-19 cases decreased, and the government began to relax some policies. The tourism sector is vital in economic recovery efforts after the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, it is necessary to identify tourism recovery to determine strategies and policies related to Indonesian tourism, especially in Bali. Multivariate time series forecasting of tourism demand can be used to identify tourism recovery using several significant data sources. The methods used are Vector Autoregressive (VAR), Support Vector Regression (SVR), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). The data used are the monthly official number of tourists, room occupancy rate, Google Trends, number of booking.com user reviews, and nighttime light intensity in Bali Province from January 2019 to December 2022. The results show that the best forecasting method is VAR, and modeling with multivariate time series forecasting can improve the performance of forecasting results. In addition, big data can be used as a source of supporting data that can provide better forecasting results, and the size of the dataset affects the selection of the best model. Furthermore, the descriptive and forecasting analysis results show that Bali tourism has experienced post-pandemic tourism recovery. The strategies and policies of the Bali government to restore Bali tourism faster are good enough.