Research of Collaborative Forecasting in Tourism Supply Chain Based on Information Sharing

This paper analyzes the collaborative forecasting problem in a three-level tourism supply chain,which consists of tourists,travel agencies and service providers.We compare two forecasting approaches through our demand forecast updating model: independent forecasting with decentralized information and collaborative forecasting with information sharing.Specifically,both the lead time and information similarity are considered in this model.The results show that(1) Collaborative forecasting can reduce the standard deviation of forecast error,thus its accuracy will be better than independent forecasting.(2) the decision makers in tourism supply chain will employ collaborative forecasting only when potential benefits outweighs the costs.Moreover,they are less likely to employ the collaborative forecasting approach when dealing with the high information sharing cost and low information similarity.