| Literature DB >> 30200626 |
Jorge Rodríguez1,2, Ivana Semanjski3, Sidharta Gautama4, Nico Van de Weghe5, Daniel Ochoa6.
Abstract
Understanding tourism related behavior and traveling patterns is an essential element of transportation system planning and tourism management at tourism destinations. Traditionally, tourism market segmentation is conducted to recognize tourist's profiles for which personalized services can be provided. Today, the availability of wearable sensors, such as smartphones, holds the potential to tackle data collection problems of paper-based surveys and deliver relevant mobility data in a timely and cost-effective way. In this paper, we develop and implement a hierarchical clustering approach for smartphone geo-localized data to detect meaningful tourism related market segments. For these segments, we provide detailed insights into their characteristics and related mobility behavior. The applicability of the proposed approach is demonstrated on a use case in the Province of Zeeland in the Netherlands. We collected data from 1505 users during five months using the Zeeland app. The proposed approach resulted in two major clusters and four sub-clusters which we were able to interpret based on their spatio-temporal patterns and the recurrence of their visiting patterns to the region.Entities:
Keywords: behavioural clustering; big data analytics; crowdsourcing; human mobility; market segmentation; smartphones; tourism management
Year: 2018 PMID: 30200626 PMCID: PMC6164420 DOI: 10.3390/s18092972
Source DB: PubMed Journal: Sensors (Basel) ISSN: 1424-8220 Impact factor: 3.576
Figure 1Province of Zeeland, the Netherlands.
Figure 2Screenshots of the Zeeland mobile application.
Figure 3Data collected by the Zeeland mobile application.
Description of the variables.
| Variable | Acronym | Description |
|---|---|---|
| User’s ID | userid | Unique identifier of the user. |
| Start time | start | Timestamp when the trip segment started. |
| End time | end | Timestamp when the trip segment ended. |
| Mode of transportation | mode | Mode of transportation used in the trip segment. |
| Distance | distance | Distance traveled between the trip segment’s starting and ending points measured in meters. |
| Waypoints | waypoints | Trajectory of geographic locations (latitude, longitude) followed from the trip segment’s starting until ending point. Additionally, every geography location contains the timestamp when the measure was gathered. |
| Duration | duration | Duration of the trip segment measured in seconds. |
Description of the variables for the clustering process.
| Variable | Acronym | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Internal trips | internal | Represents whether or not the user has trip segments into the study region. |
| External trips | external | Represents whether or not the user has trip segments out the study region. |
| Staying period | stay | Represents the staying period of the user inside the study area: none-stay (A), one visit of less than 24 h (B), one visit of more than 24 h (C), do not leave the study area (D), recurrent visits of any amount of hours (E). |
Figure 4Tourist segments in Zeeland.
Figure 5Average silhouette coefficient by clusters identified.
Figure 6Silhouette coefficient by sampling replication.
Figure 7Heat map of tourist segments vs. dataset features.
Figure 8Tourist behaviour by transport mode.
Figure 9Transport mode choices by tourist segment.
Figure 10Daily distance travelled.
Figure 11Total distance travelled.
Figure 12Country of the origin for trips that end in the Zeeland region. (a) External 24; (b) External long; (c) External recurring.