Proposal of Method for Analyzing International Students' Tourism Behavior Using a Tourism Support System

Abstract

International students come to Japan to study or conduct research; however, they should be encouraged to tour Japan as well. To this end, we have developed and operated a system to support the tourism of international students in Japan. The tourism behavior of international students have been not sufficiently studied, however. Therefore, in this study, we at first present an analysis method to analyze international students' tourism behavior using the operational data of the tourism support system and then discuss the process of analysis method from the viewpoint of data acquisition and data visualization. We conducted analysis in three contents: 1. tourism preferences and attribute analysis at the individual level, 2. comparative analysis between a plan and actual tour at the group level, and 3. comparative analysis between the tourism preferences of international students and those of foreign tourists. Based on analysis results, we were able to characterize aspects of international students' tourism behavior, such as the tendencies of visiting places, preference for types of tourism activities, and trends in understanding Japanese language and culture. As future task, we intend to improve the method to raise the accuracy of our analysis in future research. Moreover, we will attempt to automate the analysis, and increase the comprehensiveness of the tourism support system according to knowledge on tourism behavior obtained by analysis.