A tourism expert is predicting air arrivals to the Island will increase by more than 12 percent while cruise arrivals were expected to decline.

Speaking to an audience at the Bermuda College on Saturday night, Cordell Riley, managing director of Tourism research firm Profiles of Bermuda, presented a pessimistic and optimistic forecast predicting trends in travel based on figures dating as far back as 1987.

He stated air arrivals could reach 288,000, a 12.2 percent increase due to the increase in the number of airlines servicing the island, while cruise arrivals were expected to decline by 5.5 percent to 213,700. The figure for cruise arrivals showed that there were nine fewer cruise visitors in 2004 than in 2003.

Mr. Riley told the audience that his two forecasts were produced using the exponential forecasting models. The pessimistic forecast was generated by the computer using historical monthly arrivals dating back to 1987. Since the overall trend was downward the forecast showed a decrease in air arrivals of 5.5 percent. The realistic forecast was achieved by adjusting trend components of the model to accommodate the increase in seats, which then showed an increase of 7.8 percent.

The optimistic forecast was based on the anticipated number of seats for 2004 (667,000) which showed that the ratio of visitors to passengers was based on the load factor in 2003.

?Never in the past 24 years has there been an annual increase in air arrivals without there being an increase in the third quarter of the year,? he said.

Cumulative tourism arrival figures showed arrivals at the end of February were down by two percent.