A Comparative Analysis of Pickup Forecasting Methods for Customer Arrivals in Airport Carparks

Accurate forecasts of customer demand lie at the core of any successful revenue management system. Most research has focused upon studying such methods for the airline and hotel industry. In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of various forecasting methods which we apply to the rapidly evolving airport carparking (ACP) industry. We use real ACP booking data from four distinct carparks of a major airport in UK to forecast customer arrivals for one to eight weeks out in the future. Conclusions are reached with regards to which forecasting methods perform best in this operating environment, and whether there is any benefit in employing complex methods over simpler ones.

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