Tourist Attraction Popularity Mapping based on Geotagged Tweets

Abstract

The development of tourist attractions is now highly influenced by social media. The speed at which information can be disseminated via the Internet has become an essential factor in enabling distinct tourist attractions to potentially gain high popularity in a relatively short time. This condition was not as prevalent several years ago when tourism promotion remained limited to a certain kind of media. As a consequence, rapid change in the relative popularity of tourist attractions is inevitable. Against this, knowledge of tourist attraction hotspots is essential in tourism management. This means there is a need to study how to both quickly determine the popularity level of tourist attractions and encompass a relatively large area. This article utilised tweet data from microblogging website Twitter as the basis from which to determine the popularity level of a tourist attraction. Data mining was conducted using Python and the Tweepy module. The tweet data were collected at the end of April and early May 2017, at times when there are several long holiday weekends. A Tweet Proximity Index (TPI) was used to calculate both the density and frequency of tweets based on a defined search radius. A Density Index (DI) was also used as a technique for determining the popularity. The results from both approaches were then compared to a random survey about people’s perceptions of tourist attractions in the study area. The result shows that geotagged tweet data can be used to determine the popularity of a tourist attraction, although it still only achieved a medium level of accuracy. The TPI approach used in this study produced an accuracy of 76.47%, while the DI achieved only 58.82%. This medium accuracy does indicate that the two approaches are not yet strong enough to be used for decision-making but should be more than adequate as an initial description. Further, it is necessary to improve the method of indexing and the exploration of other aspects of Twitter data.