Abstract:
Information and communications technologies (ICTs) have a great impact on tourism and tourists. The use of communication networks, the internet and the internet of things by tourists in the process of tourism will produce a large amount of data with geographical labels. These big data provide the possibility for the study of large-scale instant tourism flows and tourists′ behavior. Based on the research of tourism flow and tourists′ spatio-temporal behavior at home and abroad, this paper discovers that: (1)In the research of the driving forces, massive and unstructured big data provide a new perspective for the study of tourism flow and tourism spatio-temporal behavior, and it has become an important feature in the study of tourism flow and tourists′ spatio-temporal behavior to discover knowledge driven by both data and problems in the future. (2)In the research of methods, the spatial analysis method using geographic information system is adopted to carry out the analysis of the tourism hot spot, the network and the visualization, so that the law and the knowledge can be discovered from the massive data to enhance the understanding of tourists′ behavior and promote the development of tourists′ spatio-temporal behavior theory. (3)In the research of data sources, besides the traditional data, the mobile phone data, the UGC data will become important data sources to study tourists′ spatio-temporal behavior, and different data sources and combination can be chosen according to the actual research situation. (4)In the research of topics, at present, most researches focus on the temporal and spatial distribution of tourists, the discovery of spatial network structure of tourism flow, and so on, while researches on the reasons, processes and mechanisms hidden in the law of tourists′ spatio-temporal behavior are not enough; therefore, causality analysis, process and mechanism research will be the key research directions in the future. (5)The research hotspots in the future may include the systematic study of the whole process of spatio-temporal behavior modeling of tourists based on big data, the research of data standardization and data mining methods, the research of data fusion and assimilation, the research of tourists′ privacy and ethics with big data as the background, and the research of tourists′ spatio-temporal experience, etc.
