Extraction of Tourist Destinations and Comparative Analysis of Preferences Between Foreign Tourists and Domestic Tourists on the Basis of Geotagged Social Media Data

Takashi Maeda,Mitsuo Yoshida,Fujio Toriumi,Hirotada Ohashi

doi:10.3390/ijgi7030099

Takashi Maeda, Mitsuo Yoshida + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi7030099

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Abstract

Inbound tourism plays an important role in local economies. To stimulate local economies, it is necessary to attract foreign tourists to various areas of a country. This research aims to develop a method of extracting the locations of tourist destinations in a country and to understand what characteristics foreign tourists expect of areas near tourist attractions compared with what domestic tourists expect. In this paper, a tourist destination is defined as a small area that has places of interests for tourists such as historic sites, theme parks, hotels, and restaurants. The methods proposed in this paper are applied to data acquired from Twitter and Foursquare in Japan. The proposed method successfully extracts the locations of tourist destinations and characterizes those locations based on the points of interest in the neighborhood. The results indicate that foreign tourists who come to Japan expect nightlife spots (bars, nightclubs, etc.) to be located in the neighborhood of tourist destinations, in contrast to the expectations of domestic tourists. The proposed methods are applicable to not only Japan, but to any country.

Highlights

Along with globalization and the growth of emerging countries, international tourism has been increasing
We propose a method of extracting the locations of tourist destinations on the basis of data obtained from Twitter and Foursquare and to compare the preferences of foreign tourists with those of domestic tourists
As for the second question, to determine what factors increase the number of inbound visitors, we focus on the points of interest (POIs) surrounding each tourist destination

Summary

Introduction

Along with globalization and the growth of emerging countries, international tourism has been increasing. Inbound tourism is of growing importance in many countries. According to a report from the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) [2], the number of international tourist arrivals in 2015 reached 1.2 billion. The important effect of tourist visits on regional economic growth has been demonstrated in the field of tourism economics [3,4]. It is important to increase the total number of tourists. Foreign tourist visits usually concentrate in fewer areas than those of domestic tourists. To stimulate local economies, it is important to avoid such concentration of foreign tourist visits and to draw some of those tourists to other places that have valuable touristic sites

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