<![CDATA[As a popular transportation method for long-distance travel, trains were also a preferred choice during the homecoming period before Eid Al-Fitr, one of the major religious holidays in Indonesia. During this period, known locally as ‘mudik,’ millions of people travel from the urban cities back to their hometowns to celebrate with their families, creating a significant surge in transportation demand. However, since the holiday follows the Islamic calendar, which changes slightly every year, forecasting train passengers becomes tricky, thus requiring a different approach to achieve accurate predictions. This study utilizes the Prophet method to forecast train passengers in Java (excluding the Jabodetabek area) using the data from 2006 to 2024. We also incorporated the COVID-19 period as a fixed external regressor, along with external regressors from Google Trends data using the keywords ‘kereta api’, ‘mudik’, and ‘lebaran’, which are commonly searched by the public in relation to train travel and the Eid homecoming period. The results on the test set, 2024 data, showed that the word ‘mudik’ was the most effective in improving forecast accuracy, with a MAPE of 9.12 and RMSE of 797.76, a decrease of 11.57% and 9.34% compared to the updated baseline. This indicates that public search behavior around the term ‘mudik’ closely aligns with actual travel demand patterns. The findings of this study suggest that Prophet with external regressors are capable of forecasting train passengers and Google Trends can be a valuable addition for capturing data patterns related to specific phenomenon.]]>
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