A Cross-Scale Representation of Tourist Activity Space

Destination, as a key concept in tourism geography, has largely determined the scale at which tourist activity space was modeled and studied. Existing studies usually focused on investigating tourists' activities and movements either at the intradestination (e.g., within a city) or interdestination scale. Although useful in numerous research contexts, these models based on fixed spatial scales are incapable of portraying the complex spatial structure of tourist activity spaces, which sometimes exhibit hierarchical structures, and could span across different spatial scales. In this study, we propose a new representation of tourist activity space to bridge these gaps. The representation takes tourists' accommodation locations as key reference points. At the macroscale, the sequence of accommodation locations forms the backbone of tourist activity space, denoted as itinerary type. At the microscale, we introduce the concept of territory to describe how individuals organize activities around these overnight "base camps" (i.e., accommodation locations). We apply this representation over a large-scale mobile phone data set of international travelers visiting South Korea to demonstrate its capability. Results show that four generic itinerary types capture the activity space structure of 89 percent of the tourists. The interrelationships of territories and their topological structures further categorize activity spaces into subtypes, leading to a new method of tourist classification based on their spatiotemporal activity patterns. We believe the proposed representation could enrich new perspectives and debates on how tourist activities can be studied. The representation can also be extended as a generic framework to delineate complex forms of human activity space. 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El destino del viaje, como un concepto de la geografia del turismo, ha determinado en gran medida la escala a la cual el espacio de la actividad turistica se modelaba y estudiaba. Los estudios existentes usualmente estan enfocados a investigar las actividades y movimientos de los turistas, bien a la escala del intradestino (e.g., dentro de una ciudad), o la del interdestino. Si bien estos estudios son utiles en numerosos contextos de investigacion, estos modelos basados en escalas espaciales fijas son incapaces de retratar la compleja estructura espacial de los espacios de la actividad turistica, que a veces exhiben estructuras jerarquicas, y podrian abarcar diferentes escalas espaciales. En este estudio, proponemos una nueva representacion del espacio de la actividad turistica para salvar estas lagunas. La representacion toma como puntos de referencia clave las localidades de alojamiento de los turistas. A la escala macro, la secuencia de los lugares de alojamiento forma la columna vertebral del espacio de la actividad turistica, denotada como tipo de itinerario. A la microescala, presentamos el concepto de territorio para describir el modo como los individuos organizan actividades alrededor de estos transitorios "campamentos base" (o sea, las localidades de alojamiento). Aplicamos esta representacion a un conjunto de datos de telefonia movil, a gran escala, de viajeros internacionales en visita a Corea del Sur, para demostrar su capacidad. Los resultados muestran que cuatro tipos de itinerarios genericos captan la estructura del espacio de actividad del 89 por ciento de los turistas. Las interrelaciones de los territorios y sus estructuras topologicas categorizan aun mas los espacios de actividad en subtipos, conduciendo a un nuevo metodo de clasificacion turistica basado en sus patrones espaciotemporales de actividad. Creemos que la representacion propuesta podria enriquecer nuevas perspectivas y los debates sobre como se pueden estudiar las actividades turisticas. La representacion tambien se puede extender como un marco generico para delinear formas complejas del espacio de la actividad humana.