Visitor Mobility and Spatial Structure in a Local Urban Tourism Destination: GPS Tracking and Network analysis

Koun Sugimoto,Shohei Suzuki,Kei Ota

doi:10.3390/su11030919

Abstract

Visitor mobility is an important element for facilitating sustainable local economics and management in urban tourism destinations. Research on visitor mobility often focuses on the patterns and structures of spatial visitor behavior and the factors that influence them. This study examines the relationship between visitor mobility and urban spatial structures through an exploratory analysis of visitors’ movements and characteristics, which were collected from surveys with global positional system (GPS) tracking technologies and questionnaires. The Ueno district, one of the most popular tourism destinations in Tokyo, Japan, was selected as the study area. For local stakeholders, the low accessibility levels between this district’s park zone and downtown zone have become a major destination management issue. We compared visitor movements and flow networks in various places from different major trip origins (railway stations) by using several analysis techniques (GPS log distribution, spatial movement sequences, and network analysis), and examined physical and human factors that caused the different mobility patterns. The results demonstrated that physical factors, including major transport hubs (railway stations), topography, commercial accumulation, and POI distribution, affected intra-destination visitor behavior, and segmented visitor markets into different main zones. Such findings could inform future destination management policies and planning in local urban tourism destinations.

Highlights

Urban tourism is one of the most important world-wide forms of tourism [1]
Considering the state of current research as described above, the present study focuses on the relationship between visitor mobility and spatial structure of urban tourism destinations
This study examined the relationship between visitor mobility and urban spatial structure by comparing spatial visitor behavior from three different trip origins in the Ueno district

Summary

Introduction

Visitors greatly affect the environment, society, and economy of urban tourism destinations [2]. The impacts of tourism include positive aspects, such as economic growth, and negative aspects, such as environmental deterioration due to human congestion and noise. For this reason, cities seek sustainable tourism management [3]. Efforts to promote sustainable tourism strive to bestow the long-term social and economic benefits of tourism upon various local stakeholders. Given that the spread of tourism consumption depends on the movement and flow of visitors, these efforts seek to distribute tourism consumption evenly within the region [4]. Understanding visitor mobility plays an essential role in developing policies to promote sustainable tourism

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion