Using Flickr Geotagged Photos to Estimate Visitor Trajectories in World Heritage Cities

Abstract

World tourism dynamics are in constant change, as well as they are deeply shaping the trajectories of cities. The “call effect” for having the World Heritage status has boosted tourism in many cities. The large number of visitors and the side effects, such as the overcrowding of central spaces, are arousing the need to develop and protect heritage assets. Hence, the analysis of tourist spatial behaviour is critical for tackling the needs of touristified cities correctly. In this article, individual visitor spatiotemporal trajectories are reconstructed along with the urban network using thousands of geotagged Flickr photos taken by visitors in the historic centre of the World Heritage City of Toledo (Spain). A process of trajectory reconstruction using advanced GIS techniques has been implemented. The spatial behaviour has been used to classify the tourist sites offered on the city’s official tourist map, as well as to identify the association with the land uses. Results bring new knowledge to understand visitor spatial behaviour and new visions about the influence of the urban environment and its uses on the visitor spatial behaviour. Our findings illustrate how tourist attractions and the location of mixed commercial and recreational uses shape the visitor spatial behaviour. Overflowed streets and shadow areas underexplored by visitors are pinpointed.

Using private sector geospatial data to inform policy

“…Source: https://www.oecd.org/regional/regional-statistics/geospatial-lab.htm Many city governments in OECD countries have also started to incorporate innovative data strategies to inform local policies and develop public and private partnerships to increase their data capacity (OECD, 2021 [12]). However, the number of established public and private data partnerships, even at the national scale, is limited due to a lack of coordination between stakeholders in the production of regular, frequent, and comprehensive spatial datasets based on new forms of data (Commission for Territorial Cohesion Policy and EU Budget, 2021 [13]). In the context of applied research carried out by International Organisations, an international partnership platform (Development Data Partnershiphttps://datapartnership.org/) has been created to bring together international organisations and private data companies to provide solutions to emerging global issues.…”

“…Third, it promotes a transparent methodological pipeline combined with an openly accessible dataset. Statistics Canada provides detailed documentation of the methodological workflow 12 and the resulting indicators 13 . Finally, this project integrated key aspects of environmental and economic planning, highlighting the importance of taking a holistic approach to inform place-based policies.…”

“…Proximity measures documentation: Proximity Measures Database (statcan.gc.ca)13 Proximity measures interactive map: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607-x2020011-eng.htm…”

The spatial distribution of sustainable gastronomy: a case study of tourism in Prague

“…The limited area is conditioned by the highly uneven spatiotemporal patterns of tourist behaviour and associated localization of food service establishments. Tourists tend to stay in the destination's centre that may include iconic sights, shopping areas and places of historical significance (Ashworth & Page, 2011;Domenech et al, 2020;Hayllar & Griffin, 2009;Khan et al, 2020), especially in the close vicinity of their hotel (Lin et al, 2009;Shoval et al, 2011) without a significant dispersion out of the most popular area (Zee et al, 2020;Zee & Bertocchi, 2018). Even though this has been affected by Airbnb (Ki & Lee, 2019), the highest concentration of Airbnb listings still prevails in the vicinity of the most popular attractions (Boros et al, 2018;Gutiérrez et al, 2017;Roelofsen, 2018).…”

A New Methodology to Study Street Accessibility: A Case Study of Avila (Spain)

“…Many scientific studies focus on tourist trends, proposing theories about their behavior to predict even their seasonality [9,10]. Within the different typologies of tourism, the following research refers to cultural tourism, studying behavior through images of geolocation techniques to even propose tourist routes within the different cities [11].…”