Forecasting Hotel Occupancy Rate in Riau Province Using ARIMA and ARIMAX

Hotel Occupancy Rate is one of the important leading indicators for calculating the Accommodation Sub-Category of Gross Regional Domestic Product (GRDP). By the extreme decline of the Hotel Occupancy Rate data due to COVID-19 and the unavailability of current data to counting GRDP quarterly, the Hotel Occupancy Rate prediction needs to do with the appropriate forecasting method. The authors use data from Google Trends as an additional variable in predicting the Hotel Occupancy Rate using the ARIMAX model and then compares it with the ARIMA model. The results showed that the ARIMAX model had better accuracy than ARIMA, with a MAPE value of 9.64 percent and an RMSE of 4.21 percent. This research concluded that if there is no change in government policy related to social restrictions until the end of the year, the ARIMAX model predicts the December 2021 Hotel Occupancy Rate of 38.59 percent.