Abstract
As cities become increasingly complex, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) bring smartness into organisations and communities, contributing to a more competitive tourism destination, i.e., smart tourism destinations. Enhanced information access coupled with a new kind of tourists avid for online content and predisposed to share information on social media, allows for a better understanding of tourist behaviour regarding their spatial distribution in urban destinations. Thus, smart tourism portrays individuals as information makers, refining the available alternatives for tracking their location. Big data analytics is a technology with the potential to develop Smart City services. From the analysis of the spatial distribution of tourists in the city of Lisbon based on data collected from the ‘Panoramio’ social network, we identify the most popular places in the city in a context of tourist visits. This new data largely contributes to understanding the consumption of space within urban tourist destinations and therefore enables us to differentiate the overcrowded places from the ones with potential to grow. This allows decision-makers to imagine new ways of planning and managing towards a sustainable ‘smart’ future.
Highlights
IntroductionAccording to the United Nations, by the year 2050 almost 66% of the world’s population will be living in cities [1]
The aim of this study is to (1) analyse the spatial distribution of tourists in Lisbon based on data collected from the ‘Panoramio’ social network, and (2) to explore some relations between the observed pattern and a set of variables related to the city tourism offer
The definition of tourist areas can largely benefit from the Tourism 2.0 potential, namely by analysing the concentration of the tourists’ digital imprints through location-based information, such as photos shared in social networks
Summary
According to the United Nations, by the year 2050 almost 66% of the world’s population will be living in cities [1] This urban pressure will raise a variety of problems and important challenges that will likely question the economic, social, and environmental sustainability of cities [2,3]. In parallel with this inexorable and widespread population concentration in urban centres, cities are the object of growing tourism production and consumption, capturing ever-increasing flows of visitors, according to several authors [4], as well as recent reports and insights (e.g., Global Destination Cities Index [5]; Euromonitor International [6]). As UNWTO claims, on a wider perspective, tourism is becoming “ . . . a very important element in all policies related to urban development ( . . . ) not just a strategy to provide a competitive product to meet visitors’ expectations but a way to develop the city itself and provide more and better infrastructures and bring conditions to residents” [8]
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