Given the importance of tourism demand forecasting as a research topic, the search for more accurate modelling processes continues. A model selection strategy is presented for UK outbound tourism by air to a set of the most popular European destinations. The first stage in this process presents an objective method for assessing whether seasonality should be modelled by additive or multiplicative means. The strategy moves on to the derivation of appropriate difference filters for ARIMA models of these tourism flows, a process which inherently considers alternatives for modelling increasing seasonal variation. Unlike studies involving longer-haul tourism, it is found at this spatial scale that no generalizations can be made about the stochastic or deterministic nature of trends or seasonality in the tourism flows over the destinations examined. The results also suggest that the commonly applied logarithmic transformation is not the most appropriate way to model increasing seasonal variation.
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