New data and modeling approaches are improving the usefulness of Internet search data for forecasting inbound tourist arrivals. Previous research has focused on Google Trends as a source of search data to augment tourism forecasting capabilities. In the context of rapidly increasing Chinese outbound tourism Google data lacks the market penetration in China to produce reliable auxiliary data for tourism forecasting. This short paper provides evidence of the usefulness of Baidu search data in predicting Chinese inbound tourist arrivals into a specific region in New Zealand. It also compares three modeling approaches, finding a Vector Autoregressive approach the most useful.

Key words: Forecasting, Outbound Tourism, China, New Zealand, Internet Search Data, Modelling, Baidu