Photography-based analysis of tourists’ temporal–spatial behaviour in the Old Town of Lijiang

Abstract

Improving the understanding of temporal and spatial behaviour of tourists is important for enhancing sustainable management of tourism. In recent years, with the emergence of photo-sharing Internet communities, many photographers have posted their photographs on the Internet and made them freely accessible. Generally attached to these shared photos is information about where and when the photos were taken, providing clues to establish the temporal and spatial distribution of the photographers. In this paper, we described a photography-based approach to analyse Chinese tourists' temporal–spatial behaviour identified from 1308 photos taken in the Old Town of Lijiang. We estimated tourists' temporal variation, length of stay, daily average number of tourists, individual movement traces and tourist hotspots. The results suggest that the photo-based methods have obvious advantages. We believe that this wealth of publicly available data sources with spatio-temporal information will provide a new perspective in analysing tourist flow distribution and tourist hotspots and will be helpful to plan tourism resources.

Keywords:

• tourist spatial behaviour
• georeferenced photos
• geographic information system (GIS)
• China

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by One Hundred Talents Program and Innovation Projects of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KZCX2-YW-453, D-2009-02). Thanks to Jonathan Vause, Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, for help with English and others who took part in the Project on Sustainable Lijiang City Planning.