Forecasting the Number of Passengers Serviced at the Bulgarian River Ports

The river transport in Bulgaria is controlled and coordinated by Executive Agency for Exploration and Maintenance of the Danube River. This transport and its infrastructure are put under serious pressure in connection with its membership in the European Union. The problem of forecasting in the new strategic documents is crucial to the formation of proper innovation infrastructure policy for the future development of the tourism in the country. This paper is aimed at presenting the lack of real forecasting in many of the strategic documents and projects adopted for the development of the river transport in Bulgaria (i.e. Improving the navigation of the Bulgarian-Romanian section of the Danube River; CO-WANDA convention on waste management for inland navigation on the Danube; Construction of a winter shelter for 39 vessels; NEWADA duo Network of Danube Waterway Administrations – data & user orientation; InTraRegio /Towards an Intermodal Transport Network through innovative research-driven clusters in regions of organized and competitive knowledge and many directives and decisions concerning the river transport). There are also many International Bilateral River Crossborder Agreements. The paper provides a practical example for the use of triple exponential smoothing, also known as Method Holt-Winters in the presence of a linear trend and additive and multiplicative cyclicity on the number of tourism arrivals at Bulgarian river ports.