Extraction of Tourist Destinations and Comparative Analysis of Preferences Between Foreign Tourists and Domestic Tourists on the Basis of Geotagged Social Media Data

Inbound tourism plays an important role in local economies. To stimulate local economies, it is necessary to attract foreign tourists to various areas of a country. This research aims to develop a method of extracting the locations of tourist destinations in a country and to understand what characteristics foreign tourists expect of areas near tourist attractions compared with what domestic tourists expect. In this paper, a tourist destination is defined as a small area that has places of interests for tourists such as historic sites, theme parks, hotels, and restaurants. The methods proposed in this paper are applied to data acquired from Twitter and Foursquare in Japan. The proposed method successfully extracts the locations of tourist destinations and characterizes those locations based on the points of interest in the neighborhood. The results indicate that foreign tourists who come to Japan expect nightlife spots (bars, nightclubs, etc.) to be located in the neighborhood of tourist destinations, in contrast to the expectations of domestic tourists. The proposed methods are applicable to not only Japan, but to any country.