Wi-Fi based Continuous Monitoring of Tourists' Travel Behavior: Results of Two Large-Scale Field Experiments in Japan

Abstract

In order to establish more appropriate tourism strategies, the data on tourists' traveler behavior (e.g. tourist site destination choices, trip-chain making and tour choices, and dwelling time at each spot) would be quite informative. Traditional paper-based questionnaire survey or GPS-based survey methods may not be suitable for large spatial scale analysis of tourists' travel choices because of its high costs and inefficiency. On the other hand, there have been recent several applications of Wi-Fi based approach for human monitoring or travel survey. This study seeks applicability of Wi-Fi based continuous monitoring technology for collecting tourists’ travel behavior through the data analysis from two large-scale field experiments in Japan. Monitoring equipment has been located into some popular spots and transport nodes in two popular sightseeing districts (Central Hokkaido and Main Island of Okinawa) during tourist season. After appropriately cleansing the full records at each site to obtain the dataset of probably tourists, we explore (i) day-to-day/within-day variation of tourists’ concentration across different places; (ii) staying duration of tourists at each site; and (iii) spatio-temporal patterns of tourist movements partially checking the validity of the data collected from Wi-Fi with actual observations of tourist count. The future possibility of the model development of tour patterns with machine learning techniques and discrete choice approaches are also discussed.

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