Touristic site attractiveness seen through Twitter

Aleix Bassolas,Maxime Lenormand,Bruno Gonçalves,Antònia Tugores,José J Ramasco

doi:10.1140/epjds/s13688-016-0073-5

Abstract

Tourism is becoming a significant contributor to medium and long range travels in an increasingly globalized world. Leisure traveling has an important impact on the local and global economy as well as on the environment. The study of touristic trips is thus raising a considerable interest. In this work, we apply a method to assess the attractiveness of 20 of the most popular touristic sites worldwide using geolocated tweets as a proxy for human mobility. We first rank the touristic sites based on the spatial distribution of the visitors' place of residence. The Taj Mahal, the Pisa Tower and the Eiffel Tower appear consistently in the top 5 in these rankings. We then pass to a coarser scale and classify the travelers by country of residence. Touristic site's visiting figures are then studied by country of residence showing that the Eiffel Tower, Times Square and the London Tower welcome the majority of the visitors of each country. Finally, we build a network linking sites whenever a user has been detected in more than one site. This allow us to unveil relations between touristic sites and find which ones are more tightly interconnected.

Highlights

Traveling is getting more accessible in the present era of progressive globalization
We propose a ranking of touristic sites worldwide based on their attractiveness measured with geolocated data as a proxy for human mobility
To complete the previous results, we consider the number of countries of origin averaged over random selection of users. This gives us new insights on the origin of the visitors. As it can be observed in Figure, the visitors of the Grand Canyon are mainly coming from the US, whereas in the case of the Taj Mahal the visitors’ country of residence are more uniformly distributed

Summary

Introduction

Traveling is getting more accessible in the present era of progressive globalization. Geographers and economists have attempted to understand the contribution of tourism to global and regional economy [ – ] and to assess the impact of tourism on local people [ – ]. These researches on tourism have traditionally relied on surveys and economic datasets, generally composed of small samples with a low spatio-temporal resolution. With the increasing availability of large databases generated by the use of geolocated information and communication technologies (ICT) devices such as mobile phones, credit or transport cards, the situation is changing This flow of information has notably allowed researchers to study human mobility patterns at an unprecedented scale [ – ]. Once these data are recorded, they can be aggregated in order to analyze the city’s spatial structure and function [ – ] and they have been successfully

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