Toward travel pattern aware tourism region planning: a big data approach
International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management
ISSN: 0959-6119
Article publication date: 22 March 2021
Issue publication date: 9 August 2021
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to propose and demonstrate how Tourism2vec, an adaptation of a natural language processing technique Word2vec, can serve as a tool to investigate tourism spatio-temporal behavior and quantifying tourism dynamics.
Design/methodology/approach
Tourism2vec, the proposed destination-tourist embedding model that learns from tourist spatio-temporal behavior is introduced, assessed and applied. Mobile positioning data from international tourists visiting Tuscany are used to construct travel itineraries, which are subsequently analyzed by applying the proposed algorithm. Locations and tourist types are then clustered according to travel patterns.
Findings
Municipalities that are similar in terms of their scores of their neural embeddings tend to have a greater number of attractions than those geographically close. Moreover, clusters of municipalities obtained from the K-means algorithm do not entirely align with the provincial administrative segmentation.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support from Vodafone Italy, and particularly Andrea Zaramella, Toscana Promizzione Turistica, Euro Beinat, and Collective Sensing Foundation. This support was extended to Data Science for Social Good Summer Fellowship 2018 at Nova School of Business and Economics, where an early version of the idea for this research was first proposed and tested. Authors are also very grateful to the DSSG fellows who contributing to testing the idea, and to the editors and to three peer-reviewers for their valuable comments that led to significant improvements of this paper.
Leid Zejnilovic and Qiwei Han acknowledge financial support from Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (UID/ECO/00124/2019) by LISBOA-01-0145-FEDER007722 and Social Sciences Data Lab PINFRA/22209/2016.
Citation
Han, Q., Abreu Novais, M. and Zejnilovic, L. (2021), "Toward travel pattern aware tourism region planning: a big data approach", International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Vol. 33 No. 6, pp. 2157-2175. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-07-2020-0673
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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