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– The purpose of this paper is to improve the forecast of tourism inflows into Spain by use of Google – indices on internet searches measuring the relative popularity of keywords associated with travelling to Spain.

– Two models are estimated for each of the three countries with the largest tourist flows into Spain (Germany, UK and France): a conventional model, the best ARIMA model estimated by TRAMO (model 0) and a model augmented with the Google-index relating to searches made from each country (model 1). The overall performance of both models is compared.

– The improvement in forecasting provided by the short-term models that include the G-indicator is quite substantial up to 2012, reducing out of sample mean square errors by 42 per cent, although their performance …